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Transnational Perspectives on
Latin America
Transnational
Perspectives on
Latin America
The Entwined Histories of a Multi-state Region
LU I S R O N IG E R
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Roniger, Luis, 1949– author.
Title: Transnational perspectives on Latin America : the entwined histories
of a multi-state region / Luis Roniger.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021027751 (print) | LCCN 2021027752 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197605318 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197605332 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197605325 | ISBN 9780197605349
Subjects: LCSH: Latin America—Politics and government—21st century. |
Latin America—Foreign relations. | Transnationalism.
Classification: LCC F1410 .R634 2022 (print) | LCC F1410 (ebook) |
DDC 980.04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027751
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021027752
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605318.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
Contents
Acknowledgments  vii
Abbreviations  ix
Introduction  1
1. Latin America as a Multistate Region  5
2. Latin American Modernities: Global, Transnational, Uneven,
Open-Ended  23
3. The Interface of Nation-State Building and Transnationalism  45
4. The Politics of Exclusion: Exile and Its Transnational Impacts  75
5. International Wars and Conspiracy Theories  101
with Leonardo Senkman
6. The Cold War and Its Transnational Imprint in the Americas  133
7. Democratizing Societies Confront Their Past: The Interface of
Domestic and Transnational Factors  159
8. The Crystallization and Erosion of Transnational Solidarity:
Chavismo and the Nuestramerican Rhetoric and Practice  181
with Daniel F. Wajner
9. Diasporas, Transnational Ties, and Ethnic-Religious
Minorities: Jewish and Muslim Latin Americans  205
10. Transnational Challenges and Twenty-First-Century Dilemmas  225
Epilogue  257
Notes  261
Index  317
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank many individuals and institutions that helped me bring
this book together. I am indebted to the colleagues of the research group and
international conference on Contesting Liberal Democracy held at the Institute
of Advanced Studies of Jerusalem; the participants in the seminars at the
Department of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University;
participants in the conferences of the Consortium on Political Exile; the Latin
American Studies Association; the International Political Science Association;
the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies; the workshop on trans-
nationalism at American University; and the research group on migration and
exile at CLACSO. The fruitful discussions in these venues have been important
in the formulation of several chapters. I am grateful to Leonardo Senkman and
Daniel F. Wajner for their approval of including here part of our joint work as
chapters 5 and 8. Special thanks are due to Henry Parkhurst for his outstanding
research and editorial assistance starting in January 2020, and to Omri Elmaleh
for his advice on Muslim Latin Americans.
Some of the essays in this book incorporate and expand on work published
in articles and chapters elsewhere. The core of chapter 2 derives from an ar-
ticle published in the journal Protosociology, an International Journal of
Interdisciplinary Research (Frankfurt), directed by Gerhard Preyer, 26 (2009): 71–
100. Part of c hapter 5 on the Chaco War relies on an article published in the
Journal of Politics in Latin America (Sage, CC-BY-NC license), 11 (2019): 1–20,
and the section on the War of the Pacific relies on analysis first developed in the
book América Latina tras bambalinas (Latin American Research Commons,
2019). Parts of chapter 7 derive from an analysis first developed in the Journal
of Latin American Studies (Cambridge University Press), 43 (2011): 693–724.
Chapter 8 was published originally as an article in Latin American Research
Review (LASA), 54 (2019): 458– 475. Chapter 9 incorporates Venezuelan
materials first published in the ACTA Paper “Antisemitism: Real or Imagined?
Chávez, Iran, Israel and the Jews” (Vidal Sassoon International Center for the
Study of Antisemitism, Jerusalem) in July 2009. I am grateful to these journals
and publishers for their permission to use these materials. The texts are set
here in new form as part of a systematic project highlighting aspects of Latin
American development in a framework broader than that of individual nation-
states, developing analyses on the entwined histories of this multistate region.
Abbreviations
ALADI Latin American Integration Association

ALBA Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America
ALBA-TCP Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-People’s Trade Treaty
ALCA Free Trade Area of the Americas
APRA American Popular Revolutionary Alliance
CAIS Central American Integration System
CALC Summit of Latin America and the Caribbean
CAN Andean Community of Nations
CAOI Andean Coordination of Indigenous Organizations
CARICOM Caribbean Community
CELAC Community of Latin American and Caribbean States
COICA Coordinating Body for Indigenous Organizations of the Amazonian Basin
CONAIE Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador
CONIVE Consejo Nacional Indio de Venezuela
CSN South American Community of Nations
FMLN Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (El Salvador)
FSLN Sandinista Front Army of Liberation (Nicaragua)
FTAA Free Trade Area of the Americas
IAC Ibero-American Community
IACHR Inter-American Commission on Human Rights
IGO intergovernmental organization
IIRSA Initiative for South American Regional Integration
OAS Organization of American States
ONECA Network of Central American Black Organizations
PEMEX Petróleos Mexicanos (Mexico’s Oil Company)
RAPIM Meeting of Indigenous Authorities of MERCOSUR
SAIIC South American and Mesoamerican Indian Rights Center
SOA School of the Americas
TBA Triborder Area (South America)
TIFA Framework Agreement for Trade and Investment
UNASUR Union of South American Nations
Introduction
The chapters in this book explore the historical development of Latin American
societies in terms of the twin processes of nation-state building and transnational
connections. Latin America is a multistate and polyglot region with a diversity of
races, ethnicities, and cultures, at the same time that the region shares historical
legacies, institutional frameworks, and political and socioeconomic challenges.
At various historical junctures, important social, intellectual, and political forces
led political and cultural strategies of mutual recognition in the region.
Crystallizing as the “farthest West” in global expansion, the shared charac-
teristics and inner diversity of Latin America made it a setting for comparative-
historical analysis, starting with Iberian transatlantic colonialism and its forced
intercivilizational encounters. This perspective has enabled enlightening ana-
lyses of geopolitical processes encompassing multiple countries and affecting
the political, social, and cultural experience of these societies in the Western
Hemisphere. I claim that, in addition to approaching this multistate region with
a comparative lens, one should also address it from a transnational perspective.
Only then can analysis fully account for the articulation of local and national dy-
namics with international and global dynamics. Before describing in detail how
this perspective informs the chapters of the book, let me briefly explain how my
own interest in these issues developed over the span of four decades of academic
research and publication.
As a comparative political scientist, I started working with comparative-
historical sociologist Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt and began my own work on cli-
entelism, producing systematic studies of these relations and networks. Those
studies highlighted how the regulation of power and the construction of trust
and legitimation had different articulations in societies across the globe, giving
rise to diverse modes of control of access to human and material resources, some
of which were mediated while others were more open to universal principles. At
that stage, while paying full attention to the comparative analysis of patron-client
relations and clientelism, I did not address transnational processes.1
In parallel to that research, I participated in several interdisciplinary efforts
with historians, sociologists, political scientists, and cultural analysts to ana-
lyze Latin American development as part of multiple modernities. As the region
crystallized out of various expansionist and imperialist projects in addition to
intercivilizational encounters, it was “born” global and remained part of wider
Transnational Perspectives on Latin America. Luis Roniger, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605318.003.0001
2 Transnational Perspectives on Latin America
frameworks of global exchange and interaction, yet exhibited its own peculiar
trends. Due to their historical configuration, the societies of Latin America
both are and are not part of the West. They incorporated European religions,
cultural ideas, and practices, yet at the same time had distinctive cultural and
demographic makeups, developing specific institutional trends and cultural
notions. At that stage in my studies, I was particularly interested in tracing the
interplay between the public structuring and regulation of identities and the
creative processes of collective identification, appropriation, and evasion of
identities. A major dimension of those studies involved evaluating how these
societies influenced each other and evinced different demonstration effects as
they followed the road to multiple forms of modernity and globalization.2
Those studies moved me increasingly to focus on the shifting frontiers of
citizenship and the consolidation of human rights and alternative discourses
and practices in Latin America.3 Nonetheless, my focused interest in trans-
national processes can be traced back to the mid-1990s, when, together with
political scientist Mario Sznajder, I studied how the Cold War dictatorships
of South America coordinated their policy targeting leftist activists transna-
tionally. We quickly began to assess the crucial implications of such repres-
sive coordination as these countries transitioned back to democracy. At that
stage in their development, they could not ignore the legacies of human rights
violations and had to adopt policies of transitional justice that relied on cross-
country assessments; they endured human rights crises that, due to the trans-
national character of repression, reverberated and spilled over from one state
to another.4
The émigré networks of those individuals forced to flee their countries of res-
idence and the advocacy networks they established in the diaspora emerged as
crucial factors in confronting the dictatorships and their authoritarian legacies.
We thus conducted a series of studies of political exile as a mechanism of insti-
tutionalized exclusion, then published The Politics of Exile in Latin America. In
that book we systematically assessed the historical significance and transformed
functionality of networks of political exile in the region and beyond its borders.5
The work continued subsequently in cooperative work and research also with
historians Pablo Yankelevich, Silvina Jensen, Leonardo Senkman, and James
N. Green; cultural analyst Saúl Sosnowski; and philosophers Arturo Aguirre
and Antolín Sánchez Cuervo. Analyzing the transnational impact of émigré
networks and the transformation of political exile, we all contributed to what is
now a major focus of research in the Americas.6 In Exile, Diaspora and Return,
the most recent book written in that line of analysis, we explored how post-exilic
relocations, transnational migrant displacements, and diaspora communities af-
fected Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Specifically, we provided a com-
prehensive analysis of diasporic experiences and the impact of returnees on the
Introduction 3
public life, culture, institutions, and development of post-authoritarian politics

in the Southern Cone of the Americas.7
I gained further understanding of the transnational dynamics of Latin
America’s multistate system of nations as I explored the dialectical tug of war that
unfolded in Central America between the process of distinct state consolidation
and processes of transnational engagement and disengagement in the region.
In Transnational Politics in Central America, I examined the connected history,
close relationships, and mutual impact of the countries in the Americas’ isthmus.
These nations have shared not only a close geographical relationship and history,
but also a geopolitical interdependence. This relationship has formulated pro-
found effects on the construction of political identities and the type of challenges
faced, both within the countries and in their exile communities, including sev-
eral short-lived attempts at reunification and, more recently, their articulation in
regional interstate organizations.8
All these interests and lines of analysis have found their way into this book.
In it, I have tried to show the Janus-like character of distinct state formation
and transnational linkages in Latin America. Due to their shared background
combined with multiple and diverse identities, the region has long provided a
framework for comparative analyses. While this remains true, adding a transna-
tional analysis provides deeper understanding of the region’s political, cultural,
and social dynamics. Transnational dimensions remained strong throughout the
process of crystallization of nation-states. With its porous borders and a series
of diasporas, migrations, and relocations while facing similar challenges of post-
colonial development, Latin America experienced a profound spillover of people
and ideas. The region has long witnessed cross-border movements and struggles,
prompting international agreements on issues of common concern, including
human rights, working out mechanisms regionally even before those princi-
ples reached a global scale. Cold War tensions and post–Cold War mechanisms
of transitional justice heightened shared experiences, further muddling strong
notions of completely separate collective identities and disconnected policies
and cultural trends. Social scientists, political theorists, and historians often
analyzed these countries either as individual nation-states or as the pawns and
victims of global insertion and international intervention. While these aspects
are very relevant, in this book I also focus on the transnational linkages oper-
ated by exile networks that cross borders and reformulate political projects, the
transnational spillover of coercion and narratives of liberation, the character of
democratization processes, the crystallization of new transnational movements,
and various processes of legitimation and delegitimation of minorities with
transnational connections. My first step is to define what is in a name, and what
analytical perspectives can best account for the development of this multistate
region.
1
Latin America as a Multistate Region
The idea of regions is a highly contested analytical concept and can be subject to
criticism from both the optic of distinct nation-states and global perspectives.
Due to the constructed conceptual character of regions, attempts at attributing
a fixed or essential nature to them are pitfalls. Moreover, the contested and
shifting nature of boundaries and borders, particularly under the impact of glob-
alization, beleaguer area studies. Indeed, a series of processes of global interde-
pendence has further called into question the very idea of regions possessing
identifiable boundaries and relatively stable sociodemographic configurations.
Among them, the heterogeneous process of globalization and multiculturalism
stands out; its conceptualization has constantly shifted under the impact of the
ebbs and flows of transnational migration, the transference of ideas, the prolif-
eration of diasporas, and the crystallization of increasingly complex identities,
commitments, and international alliances.1 Peter A. Hall and Sidney Tarrow
called attention to this trend decades ago, stressing the capacity of area studies
to provide context-rich knowledge as well as develop propositions of general
applicability.2
It is not surprising, then, that the labels usually used to describe the region
at the center of this book vary and include Latin America, Hispanic America,
Lusoamerica, Iberoamerica, and Francophile America, among others. All of
these terms are loaded with diverse historical and political significance, as they
were coined by diverse geopolitical projects intended to shape the horizons
and political boundaries of the Western Hemisphere. These various conceptual
constructs are claims put forward by intellectual and political elites who pro-
moted geopolitical projects envisioning a bridging of the various social, histor-
ical, economic, and political contexts of different subregions in the Americas.
Debates developed about the very terms used to address a region of fluid bound-
aries whose connotations have shifted repeatedly in the course of the last two
centuries. Yet as stressed by contextual constructionism, though arising in spe-
cific contexts, some of those claims have been projected and endorsed recur-
rently in the region, thus conferring real transnational impact and validation on
the contrasting images of Latin American solidarity and fratricide.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605318.003.0002
What Is in a Name? The Conceptual Constructs for a

Multistate Region
“Latin America” is the umbrella term I use hereafter. The concept usually
encompasses Brazil, Haiti, and the eighteen Spanish-speaking states of the
Americas and has come to be used by intellectuals and others in those nations.
Writ large, intellectuals, diplomats, activists, and other elites coined the term in
the mid-nineteenth century, when the region first witnessed North American
expansionism, a generation after the Monroe Doctrine.
With independence, the self- referential term for the region remained
Americas and soon Hispanic America and Lusoamerica, to distinguish it from
the United States or Anglo-America. In their Voyage aux régions équinoxiales
du nouveau continent (1816–26), Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé J. A.
Bonpland used the term “Latin race” to refer to peoples living in those parts of
the Western Hemisphere. Two generations later, a sense of transnational soli-
darity was generated across the region after the US victory over Mexico in the
Mexican-American War (1846–48), followed by the 1856 takeover of power in
Nicaragua by William Walker and his North American adventurers. As ana-
lyzed in chapter 3, Walker’s intention to expand his control across Central
America galvanized a coalition of forces in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and neigh-
boring states to wage a “national war” that in fact was fought by transnational
forces. The chance of losing territory again, which was contrary to the principles
of Bolivarianism (equal standing of American states and resistance to territo-
rial gains by war, predicated by Simón Bolívar), galvanized the peoples of the
Western Hemisphere. In a detailed analysis of “the invention of Latin America,”
historian Michel Gobat indicated how such developments motivated Spanish
Americans to imagine their region as a geopolitical community. Fears of US
expansionism mobilized Central Americans and brought South Americans to
draft plans for an anti-US alliance, geared to activate South American aid for the
war against Walker, while envisioning the creation of a confederation of states
resisting US expansion in any part of the continent.3 In parallel, diplomats and
exiles living in Paris coined the term Latin America to represent discursively,
and in some cases diplomatically, their home countries vis-à-vis the intellectual
and political circles of Europe. At that time, the French state envisioned itself
controlling parts of the region, particularly Mexico.
Lusoamerica and Hispanic America are terms with a more restricted de-
notation than Latin America. Lusoamerica stresses the cultural connection of
Brazil, the core seat of the global Portuguese Empire for a short period in the
early nineteenth century, to the home country, once the two empires followed
their separate paths without engaging in war. The term Hispanic America, while
older, grew strongest by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Latin America as a Multistate Region 7
Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the modernists resumed a spirit

of Hispanic or Iberian rapprochement on which to base their rejection of US
expansionism. As for Iberoamerica, that term received support from German
Latin Americanists, leaving French latinité aside.
In addition to the twenty states usually included, the term Latin America
also embraces other territories: Puerto Rico; the French-speaking territories
of Canada (mainly Quebec and parts of New Brunswick); parts of the United
States (primarily in the South, as in the case of Louisiana); and France’s over-
seas Caribbean departments of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana.
Likewise, almost half of the continental United States is territory that was
conquered—and its population annexed—in the Mexican-American War, which
erupted in the wake of US annexation in 1845 of Texas, a state whose secession in
the 1830s Mexico refused to recognize. The Latin presence persisted throughout
these territories in people’s names and sites; in food, customs, and practices; and
in historical records and personal memories. Later on, the waves of transnational
migration from Latin America—primarily from Mexico, the Caribbean, and
Central America—into the United States recreated the meaning of being Latin@
and the boundaries of the “Latin American” region in novel ways.4
I retain the term Latin America as a label for the countries of South, Central,
and North America shaped by the global expansion of continental Europe into
the Western Hemisphere. That turn in history affected the political and economic
structures and the collective imagination of the Old World while reshaping the
institutions and collective visions of millions living and settling in the Americas.
The conquest, settlement, and extraction of riches in the New World would
shape the forms of state formation, the development of capitalism, and the con-
struction of civilization by a new type of modernity.
The very existence of a region defined as Latin America or as Iberoamerica
is nonetheless problematic. Latin Americans consider themselves Americans,
and many oppose the arrogant cooptation of the continent’s name by the United
States, only one of the thirty-four countries that share the Western Hemisphere.5
Moreover, one can easily deconstruct the notion by merely indicating the huge
differences that separate the component states from one another, in terms of
both their demographic composition and their distinct ecological, institutional,
and historical development. Students of Latin America stress time and again
the inner variability of the region: the huge distance that separates the Afro-
Caribbean and Afro-Brazilian areas from the Indo-American mountain ranges
and valleys covering the Andes from South to North, and the Euro-American
complex of much of the Southern Cone and mestizo America as constructed in
Mexico, parts of Central America, Venezuela, and so forth. Similarly, from an
institutional perspective, the area has lived through a multiplicity of political and
institutional experiences, on a spectrum that varies enormously as one goes, for
instance, from Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia through Brazil, Chile, Argentina,
and Mexico, to Colombia and Central America.
Accordingly, it might be wiser to use “Latin Americas” in the plural, provided
the term did not sound so awkward. Nonetheless, I claim that with all the ag-
gregative distortion of referring to Latin America in the singular, the term and
the images it evokes are highly important. They are significant because they en-
able the retention of a trans-state and transnational perspective on the region,
its institutions, and its political culture. Indeed, the continued use of “Latin
America” is justified by the many geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends
that have shaped a contiguity of influences, leading sometimes to confrontations,
but overall shaping a transnational arena of connected histories, interactions, and
visions. Addressing such entangled histories and dynamics requires considering
the process of nation building itself, while moving away from methodological
nationalism. Only then can one fully understand the dynamics of a region of
multiple “sister nations” sharing historical and cultural connections and de-
veloping divergent paths while unable to fully disengage from one another, thus
experiencing persisting processes that cross over international borders.
In Latin America, nation-state horizons increasingly superseded the transna-
tional domain imagined by intellectuals, writers, and activists, but never forced
its disappearance. Since Bolívar the Liberator envisioned, yet failed to achieve,
his “Bolivarian” vision of a South American political union in the early nine-
teenth century, the idea of a regional consciousness and identity has never
disappeared; rather, it has remained persistently relevant. Independence leaders
moved across American territories. José de San Martín became the “Protector of
Peru,” in addition to liberating Chile after crossing from Cuyo, an area recently
incorporated into the realm of Buenos Aires. A native of New Granada, Antonio
José de Sucre was head of state of Bolivia. Honduran liberal Francisco Morazán
ruled over the entire Central American Republic. Guatemalan Antonio José de
Irisarri fulfilled public functions in Chile; as a Chilean diplomat, he served in
Buenos Aires, Central America, and Peru, and as a Guatemalan and Salvadoran
diplomat, in Ecuador and Colombia, before moving to Curação and the United
States.
Moreover, based on common roots, culture, and institutions, Latin American
societies not only struggled over the porous borders of independent states but
also moved to establish international norms of regional interaction and coex-
istence. The transnational point of departure also led to repeated attempts to
create multistate confederations, such as Great Colombia, the Central American
Republic, and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation, and to the later emergence
of international regional organizations, for example, the Andean Community,
the Central American Common Market, and Mercosur, and broader regional
organizations such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America
(ALBA), the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), and the Community
of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
The transnational domain has remained present in a series of recurrent
phenomena. Among them are the repeated emergence of intellectuals and
leaders claiming to be speaking not only for their nations but also for their
sister nations, as well as the emergence of intellectual and social movements
committed to continental horizons, be they reformist or revolutionary. Take
for instance Latin American modernists such as José Martí, Rubén Darío, or
José Santos Chocano. During his long exile, Cuban poet, essayist, and activist
Martí relocated to New York, yet his voice became known transnationally
through his columns in periodicals published in Buenos Aires, Caracas, and
Mexico. Nicaraguan poet Darío published his book of stories and poems Azul
in Valparaíso, and he was able to read and find inspiration in French authors
consulted while working in a private library in San Salvador. Peruvian poet and
diplomat José Santos Chocano published not just in his native Perú but also in
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, and Chile. Moreover, intellectuals were also
political figures, whose writings mobilized others to action and whose activism
inspired their cultural work. Argentine president Bartolomé Mitre wrote his-
tory, and his successor, Domingo F. Sarmiento, was an accomplished essayist.
Colombian presidents Rafael Núñez and Miguel Antonio Caro started their
careers as men of letters. Even Guatemalan dictator Estrada Cabrera was a poet
and patron of poets.6
The crystallization of regional practices and legal doctrines imbued with the
spirit of Bolivarianism is similar. Ideally, these doctrines were geared to regu-
lating international relationships and reducing tensions between states in the
region, as evidenced in the precocious elaboration of principles of noninterven-
tion, rejection of territorial gains by war, treaties that dealt with the widespread
presence of political exiles, mechanisms of mediation, and diplomatic negotia-
tion. Last, but not least, has been the recurrent drive to create a myriad of regional
and subregional organizations, even if they are overlapping and segmented. Such
transnational trends and forces at work justify developing a region-wide analyt-
ical perspective, in spite of cross-country variation and the socioeconomic and
cultural diversity that prevails within the territorial boundaries of countries.
Another common characteristic in the region, again cloaked in debate, has
been the drive of these countries to develop and modernize, an idea that—
even if interpreted in contrasting ways, for instance by liberals, Marxists, or
neoconservatives—has trickled down from elites and permeated, from very early
on, even the lower echelons of society. Again, the issue of Latin American mod-
ernities has led to recurrent controversy and discussion. There is much debate
about the modernity of Latin America: when, where, and how Latin America is
or has been modern. The controversy and subsequent debate has been going on
for two centuries, transforming the region into one of the most exciting loci of
thought and reflection on collective identities in the world.
Hereafter I attempt to tackle some of the transnational and comparative
dimensions of the region, the global connections, and the ways in which col-
lective identities have been constructed and reconstructed. My analysis devotes
special attention to the major challenges of a region “born” global out of colo-
nialism and intercivilizational encounters, followed by its insertion into global
economic circuits in postcolonial times. Seen as the “farthest West,” the region
maintains an ambiguous and often conflict-ridden relationship with Western
modernity and hegemony. Yet, as discussed later in detail, the relatively open-
ended character of modernity and its vision of potential material and cul-
tural progress have been major assets for the endorsement of future-oriented
perspectives in Latin America. I suggest that in Latin America the confrontation
with Western modernity has been a confrontation with roots, discourses, and
institutions that turned out to be their own because of colonial and postcolonial
domination. Accordingly, from very early on the dynamics of Western develop-
ment have linked those American territories to global and transnational arenas,
turning modernity into an ever-fleeting reality and leading to recurring attempts
to reconstitute and attain its unfulfilled promises in the region. Recently, some of
these attempts have led to reappraisals of Native American cultural heritages, as
in Ecuador and Bolivia, albeit coined also in terms of those unfulfilled promises.
Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

on Latin America
Latin America has long been an ideal laboratory for comparative analysis, as
it is a multistate and polyglot region with a diversity of races, ethnicities, and
cultures, as well as shared historical legacies, institutions, and developmental
challenges. Such a perspective has allowed breaking out an excessive focus on
individual nation-states, enlightening processes that encompass multiple coun-
tries and uniting many political, social, and cultural experiences throughout
the Western Hemisphere. It is my claim that notwithstanding the importance of
comparative research, we should add a transnational perspective when analyzing
Latin America. When combined with a comparative optic, such a perspective
enables a richer, multilayered analysis that enlightens the existence of circum-
Latin American processes of circulation, transmission, and articulation among
subnational, state, regional, and wider arenas and networks.
The transnational perspective stems from finding interlocking approaches be-
tween the move to global history and the discussions that such a move has gen-
erated among supporters of historical distinctiveness.7 These discussions have
opened the way for bringing comparative analysis and transfer/transnational

studies closer and have triggered the analysis of what Sanjay Subrahmanyam
has defined as connected histories,8 or what Michael Werner and Bénédicte
Zimmermann have called histoire croisée.9 Indeed, my approach benefits from
paradigmatic shifts in history and the social sciences, as developed by Akira Iriye
and others, which are of great importance for regional studies.10
These developments inform a renewed interest in the emergence of regional
frameworks; the redrafting of trans-state exchanges; and the burgeoning presence
of transnational movements and networks, both those that support contempo-
rary processes of globalization and many others that oppose it. As Michelle Pace
has indicated, regions involve practices of boundary production that construct
regions discursively and cannot fully discard contestation and disagreement.11
From an international relations (IR) perspective, Thomas Risse-Kappen simi-
larly called attention to the multilayered character of transnational interactions
across national boundaries “when at least one actor is a non-state agent or does
not operate on behalf of a national government or an intergovernmental organi-
zation.” Increasingly, transnationalism has evinced itself worldwide in thousands
of international nongovernmental organizations (IGOs), transnational
movements, and transgovernmental issue networks with a growing impact on
normative frameworks and ideas such as human rights, the environment, and
institutional probity.12 Accordingly, IR scholars have suggested moving beyond
a dichotomist reading of Global North-South relations to engage in an intellec-
tual dialogue across the virtual or imagined North-South divide. According to
Arie Kacowicz and Daniel F. Wajner, such dialogue will necessarily challenge
the usual hegemonic assumption that only world order scenarios enacted by
Northern scholars, politicians, and practitioners have a global reach, whereas the
Southern inputs and agency are minimal or nonexistent.13
The transnational turn also builds on anticolonialist and postcolonial schol-
arship, contributing to the analysis of “units that spill over and seep through
national borders, units both greater and smaller than the nation-state.”14 Social
constructivism has been instrumental in drawing attention to transnational
practices, as analyzed by Craig Calhoun and others, along with feminist works
elaborated following the seminal notion of the “politics of location,” coined long
ago by Adrienne Rich.15
Within this framework, we discern the vibrant transnational turn to analyses
neither fully determined by the whims and primacy of developed countries’ ge-
opolitical priorities and visions nor driven fully by globalization. Thus, for in-
stance, by following comparative inquiries into intercrossings between societies,
these perspectives provide awareness of how processes and reflexivity about
them are—to follow Pierre Bourdieu—socially constructed. That is, we see how
they reflect networks, mutual impacts, resistances, inertias, new combinations,
and transformations “that can both result from and develop themselves in the
process of crossing” social and physical borders. As such, this turn in history
and the social sciences conceives the transnational level as interacting with
the others, yet creating its own logics and feedbacks: “from being limited to a
macroscopic reduction, the study of the transnational level reveals a network
of dynamic interrelations whose components are in part defined the links they
maintain among themselves and the articulations structuring their positions.”16
In this new stage, there is awareness of the constructed character and multilay-
ered structure of regions. When applied to Latin America, this perspective opens
ground for recognizing the existence of shared, distinct, and mutually impinging
forms of institutional building and crystallization of civilizational patterns. These
can be traced back to the models projected into the transatlantic world with the
expansion of Iberian colonialism into the Americas starting in the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth centuries. These projections have been reconfigured through
three centuries of colonial rule and recreated after political independence, with
mutual impact across countries in spite of the process of construction of separate
states and nationalities.
In this framework, we can consider several key transnational aspects. Among
them are the connections between sister nations, particularly when nonstate
actors are involved; the protracted and only partial disengagement from one
another’s affairs, carried out by political exiles and other wandering individ-
uals; the rise of intellectuals and politicians prioritizing international law and
institutions as a way to preserve sovereignty from foreign intervention; and the
spillover effects of geographical and historical closeness. All these factors prompt
us to realize that by confining our attention only to separate nation-states, we
may lose rather than gain perspective on Latin America.
Beyond the question of the appropriate focus of analysis for empirical work,
there is much sense in embracing a regional perspective for this set of societies
in the Americas, looking also for forces and processes that have connected them
beyond their variance, even as we try to understand localized developments
and trends. One may easily identify at least three such dimensions of analysis in
which the regional perspective may be instrumental in addition to case studies
focused on specific countries and subnational arenas. The first is the bridging of
scholarly compartmentalization. The second can be seen in the recognition of
transnational dimensions that have existed in the region since colonial times but
remained largely ignored in the heyday of consolidation of nation-states. Third
is the connectedness of historical processes affecting a region, such as political
trends, cultural visions, and economic ideas spreading from beyond the bound-
aries of single states and societies.
A pan–Latin American perspective also provides an ideal framework for
comparative analysis. It is instrumental in bridging trendy gaps separating the
societies of Latin America in terms of their separate languages, for instance

separating Brazil from Spanish-or French-speaking parts of the Americas.
Historian Barbara Weinstein has called attention to the ongoing tensions in
the field of Latin American history between Spanish America and Portuguese
America, asking to what extent they together constitute a coherent subject of
study.17 In spite of Brazil being the biggest, most populous, and until recently,
wealthiest and most industrialized country, Weinstein has indicated that at least
among historians, Brazilianists often bemoan the reluctance of most Hispanic
Americanists to fully integrate Brazil in their analyses. The rather idiosyncratic
character of Brazil’s postcolonial experience, revealed in its comparative ter-
ritorial lack of fragmentation, the intensification of plantation economies and
slavery (Brazil was the last nation in the Americas to end slavery, in 1888), and
the structure of imperial Brazil that contrasted with republican Spanish-speaking
countries, prompted the use of separate lenses to approach both areas. Yet as
Weinstein shows, by limiting discussion—for example, in colonial/postcolonial
studies, to specific subaltern groups, mostly the indigenous populations in most
Spanish Americas—rather than addressing many existing and often-blurred cat-
egories and conventional boundaries, much is lost.
The dilemmas implied in the construction of national identities and their
implications for the marginalization of subaltern groups have been shared across
the continental divide between Brazil and Spanish America, beyond specificities
due to the demographic composition of the countries. Weinstein discusses, for
instance, parallels in the negotiation of inclusion and exclusion that followed
the same logic in early postcolonial times. Thus, in Brazil, free persons of color
asserted their rights as citizens and resisted the racialization of political status
while acquiescing to the limits on citizenship in the form of slavery, much as mes-
tizo and ladino populations in the Andes, Mexico, and Central America resisted
policies that would reduce them to the same status as indigenous populations. By
approaching such varied configurations within a shared analytical framework,
new understandings of state and nation building are achieved.
A regional perspective also enables defining the national realm in ways that
do not endorse essentialism, but rather reconstruct the evolving meanings of
being national as often embedded within transnational implications. A classic
example is Central America. From a geopolitical perspective, the isthmus is a re-
gion composed of small republics standing in relative proximity to one another,
making it prone to be affected by political processes in neighboring societies and
polities. The core states of Central America trace their origins back to the disin-
tegration of a single state, established in the early nineteenth century, based on a
previous colonial jurisdiction. Accordingly, research can trace the parallel pro-
cesses of construction of separate nation-states and the intricate transnational
connections among them, which affected the modes of adoption of institutional
and cultural trends identified with modernity. This is crucial for understanding
past developments and envisioning the future of that region. Emerging from
imperial disintegration, the states eventually strove to create their own nations,
attempting to “render them real” by using official accounts and rituals; the elab-
oration of hegemonic material and symbolic practices; and the structuring of
images of peoplehood, connected to spatial and temporal boundaries. Such
strategies of nation building involved the partitioning of territories that once
belonged to the same political entity, the formation of confined membership,
and the delineation of borders, organized according to principles of national sov-
ereignty. Born out of shared colonial administrative jurisdictions and a short-
lived attempt at unification following independence, these states have striven to
construct their national identities and idiosyncrasies, as well as to develop their
institutional distinctiveness. All the while, they have been unable to completely
disengage themselves from the “sister republics” and are constantly learning
from one another.18
The creation of separate nations also involved systems of cultural represen-
tation that legitimized or delegitimized different access to the resources con-
trolled by the nation-states.19 Once separate, the republics faced the dual task
of consolidating their territorial control and domination while constructing a
sense of collective identity through their policies, practices, and ceremonies.
They had to define and create national membership and boundaries, which
implied recognizing certain categories of citizenship as paramount, while
replacing, ignoring, or denying—without fully eradicating—earlier forms of
identification, including the pan-isthmian identity, and subsuming more local-
ized and ethnic identities.
For decades after their separation, the states had porous and poorly defined
territories and were not able to seclude themselves from regional interventions,
driven by either the prospect of taking power on their own turf or the wish to
expand their hold on wider territorial spaces. Overshadowing the construction
of sovereign realms and separate identities were their common origins, which
left a legacy of cross-national networks of kinship, economic, social, and po-
litical ties and an image of an alternative project of regional nation building.
Individuals could rely on such an image when relocating to sister countries or
challenging current institutional arrangements and political divisions. From
the perspective of the symbolic enactment of separate national identities,
primordiality—in the form of ethnicity or race—was secondary to the political
and civic strategies adopted while constructing nationhood. From early on, elites
were fully aware that local identifications existed, but they also recognized that
there were no strong lines necessarily separating republics from one another or
portraying the others as unalterably different in an incommensurable manner.
Moreover, the way in which these states declared independence implied that they
envisioned their collective identity not as naturally given, but rather as a civic
accomplishment.
These trends draw attention to the importance of keeping a regional perspec-
tive as the basis for the analysis of specific countries. In the case of the Southern
Cone, it took civil wars over several generations to consolidate the porous and
poorly defined territories and unify the different regions into countries. In
fact, the formation of Uruguay was intended to conclude the endless struggle
between the Portuguese and Brazilian empires and the Spanish-speaking terri-
tories. Likewise, in the Andean area, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile became involved
in cross-national confrontations that would change their physical and cultural
boundaries, with exiles participating in the process of construction of distinctive
nation-states. In the northwestern corner of South America as well, Venezuela,
Colombia, and Ecuador remained entangled for many decades after the dis-
memberment of Great Colombia. In the case of the republics of Central America,
the process of nation building was also complicated by their shared origins, the
complex process of promulgation of independence, and the protracted mutual
involvement of each state in the affairs of its neighbors. Thus, for instance, the
intervention by North American filibusters in the mid-nineteenth century led
to a war fought by what today we would define as a “transnational” alliance of
nationals of all isthmian countries. Still, paradoxically—or perhaps not, since it
fit the logic of state claims—this war became known in local historiographies as
“the National War.” Repeatedly, the national angle has been embedded with a
transnational dimension. That is, the transnational realm has often supported
and superseded the meaning of being part of a nation in the isthmus. A similar
dynamic was present in South America.20
The concept of transnationalism, as considered in this work, addresses the
interconnectivity between individuals, groups, and nations that is often trig-
gered by social processes, political movements, and cultural ideas and networks
extending beyond national boundaries and state borders that have in turn con-
ditioned such dynamics.21 Such interconnectivity may develop—although not
necessarily—along organizational lines. Often it becomes equally visible in
cultural bonds, historical memories, cross-border networks, and unstructured
migration flows. Diaspora networks have been a major instance of such dy-
namics.22 Likewise, travels and waves of expatriation and forced migration are
also crucial, as they have generated experiences and lifestyles that encompass
multiple national spaces and territories, as if they were intertwined or “halfway”
(“betwixt and between” was anthropologist Victor Turner’s concept, originally
used to describe rites of passage). Such varied forms of human mobility have
created transnational networks that span several countries and participate in
various types of activity, ranging from solidarity and advocacy to illegal and
violent social networks, which also operate on a transnational scale. Equally
important is the formation of new forms of consciousness and decentered at-

tachment and the correlated appearance of hybrid and multiple identities, as well
as cultural spaces that encompass syncretism, bricolage, and cultural transla-
tion. Take for example the grassroots movements of both right-and left-wing
orientations that maintain transnational contacts and support local networks.
In parallel, planetary concerns—with ecology, air pollution, energy, health, and
sustainable development—have become increasingly relevant, as evidenced by
the growing number of international NGOs. The participation of individuals and
nonstate actors in these organizations is a reflection of a growing concern for the
human condition in broader terms than ethnic attachments or membership in a
nation-state.
The transnational perspective is also important in contemplating how
intellectuals, diplomats, jurists, and practitioners have elaborated and promoted
norms of international law and international institutions as related to interna-
tional peace and security, with implications not only for their region, in this case
Latin America, but also for the world order as a whole. Arie Kacowicz and Daniel
F. Wajner indicate how over two centuries of political sovereignty, Latin American
countries developed a strong rejection of external intervention and a distinctive
juridical tradition of principles of national sovereignty, nonintervention, and
peaceful settlement of disputes among themselves. In addition, the region has
pioneered international normatives. Thus, “norms of arms control, collective secu-
rity, and confidence-building measures have been implemented in Latin America
well before Europe. Likewise, the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967 established the first
nuclear-free zone in the world, setting a precedent for other regions.”23 Equally
evident is the precocious role of Latin American countries in developing interna-
tional humanitarian and human rights law. The region’s support for such progress
has been shown in the treaties enshrining policies of asylum and in the American
Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, approved by the Ninth International
Conference of American States (Bogotá, 1948), which preceded the United
Nations declaration by six months. Moreover, as they made up a third of the initial
members of the UN, Latin American delegates were also key actors pushing for
a universal recognition of social and economic rights in addition to political and
civil rights. Latin American countries have also been pioneers in the global recog-
nition of native rights, as reflected in their majoritarian presence among the signa-
tories of Convention C169 on indigenous and tribal peoples of the International
Labor Organization (ILO). In addition, in recent years several of these countries
have even incorporated international covenants and human rights law into their
own legislation, granting them constitutional precedence over their laws.24
The role these states and societies have played in contemporary processes
of globalization and trans-state migration, human trafficking, and criminal
networks is also relevant. A case in point is the transnational illicit networks
that, following migration to the United States in the period of the civil wars in
the isthmus and after being socialized into crime there, have been deported or
returned to the societies of origin to project their new know-how and transna-
tional contacts into the establishment of illicit networks. These networks cross
nation-state boundaries and require a transnational approach on the part of
those willing to control their social and political impact.25 The capacity of these
states to cooperate beyond the economic realm, where they have carried out a
lifting of custom regulations, depends on long-term memories, suspicions, and
commitments. These factors cannot be reduced to economic processes, even if
the latter are a highly important component. Social orientations, political cul-
ture in a broad sense— which includes narrative constructions, discourse,
and practices—and institutional design are also central to such an inquiry on
transnationalism.
Another important dimension suggesting the relevance of an approach to
Latin America broader than that of nation-states is the connectedness of his-
torical processes affecting the region and its political trends, cultural visions,
and economic ideas beyond the boundaries of individual states and societies.
Thus, major developments in the history of these countries have occurred due to
shifting policies led by hegemonic powers. Latin America went from connecting
to an international division of labor under British economic hegemony to joining
the US sphere of influence throughout most of the twentieth century, through
the Cold War period, subsequent democratization, and the onset of neoliberal
policies in the 1990s. Only recently, with the decline of US hegemony and the
engagement of Latin America in a multipolar and rather anarchical world order,
has this scenario changed radically.
In parallel, anti-Americanism remained salient in Latin America, particularly
after the 1890s, when the United States rose to hegemonic status in the Western
Hemisphere. This was a reflection of geopolitical conflict—starting as early as
the 1840s in Mexico—and the recurrent disappointment with US actions that
were not commensurate with the values that many would come to admire in the
neighbor in the North. This is what Max Paul Friedman detailed when pointing
out an extreme case of that reflection, what he termed the “Nicaraguan paradox”:
Why was the most Americanized country in Central America, whose

inhabitants went to far as to prefer baseball to soccer, also home to two of
Latin American’s most successful revolutionary movements of the twentieth
century—bringing down the wrath of the United States upon Sandino in the
1930s and the Sandinistas in the 1980s?26
As Friedman elaborates, it was the aggressive US policies and the gap be-
tween them and the ideals that the United States claimed to defend—not
psychological hatred or irrational paranoia— that stood behind the wary

reactions of intellectuals and political activists throughout the region, which pro-
vided the transnational banner of solidarity with Latin American sister nations.
One particularly grim part of this interconnectedness in the Americas has
been the role played by the United States during the Cold War, as it trained Latin
American military officers in The School of the Americas and bolstered repres-
sion of leftist activists and presumed sympathizers under the guise of doctrines
of national security. The transnational methods of counterinsurgency projected
a legacy of human rights violations onto the reconstructed democracies of the
region for decades thereafter. In this new stage, any human rights crisis in one
country reverberated in the others transnationally.27
Another transnational angle of that period of confrontation, repression, de-
portation, and escape abroad is the phenomenon of massive political exile and
the formation of transnational diasporas. The study of political exile shows that
individuals forced to relocate in the region have made important contributions to
the construction and reconstruction of national narratives since independence.
For instance, Edward Blumenthal has shown how the very ideas of Argentine
or Chilean nationality were shaped when nineteenth-century exiles and émigrés
had to address two different publics by appealing to public opinion through
images of a shared history and common past.28 When states had consolidated
there, as elsewhere in the Americas, exiles claimed they were the true represent-
atives of the national spirit and thus redefined repeatedly what it meant to be a
national of the country of origin, sometimes even challenging the conception of
the national within established borders.29
Similarly, recent studies have traced how the transnational gaze between
Brazil and neighboring Spanish-speaking countries has impacted ideas not
just at the level of knowledge, but also and most effectively at the levels of
moral judgment and action, affecting key political and social “national”
events. Historian Ori Preuss has shown how the institution of the monarchy
loomed large in the self-image of Brazil’s intellectual and political elite, as
Brazilian stability generated a sense of superiority compared to most Spanish-
American republics. Looking at the turmoil and civil wars that had torn apart
those republics since independence in the early nineteenth century, Brazilians
felt complacent for decades. Those attitudes changed while cooperating with
Argentina in the Triple Alliance War against Paraguay (1864–70), challenging
the idea of Brazilian superiority and raising concerns about imperial rule and
the institution of slavery, which was pervasive in Brazil. Preuss discussed how
these concerns led to defiance of the monarchy by Brazilian republicans and
liberals in the 1870s and to the eventual fall of the monarchy in 1889. Brazil
thus experienced a series of fundamental changes in which Spanish American
countries such as Argentina and Chile functioned as a “significant other,”
being reframed repeatedly by both monarchist and republican leaders into a

positive model and playing an important role in redefining regional projects
and alliances.30
A further focus of recent interest is the study of frontiers as shifting areas of
encounter and interaction between societies, economies, and political networks,
which underscore the tug of war between modernist projects of state control
and the creativity and practices of local peoples moving across borders.31 There
are various fascinating examples of such dynamics and optics leading to new
readings of Latin American history. Among them is how to understand the de-
bacle in the Pacific War (1879–83) as developing out of the dynamics of frontier
societies rather than as a war resulting from a British conspiracy against Peru
and Bolivia with Chile as the proxy partner. In the war, Chile defeated Bolivia
and Peru, occupying territory of both countries. Peru and Bolivia lost much
territory, including 480 kilometers of coastline, thus closing Bolivia’s access to
the sea. That war left deep marks on all three countries. Each of the belligerent
countries then developed its own narrative to explain and justify the outcome
of the war and the basis of what each considered its legitimate rights over the
disputed territories. Beyond the conflicting narratives and mutual grievances,
professional historians have reconstructed the roots of the conflict in the explo-
sive socioeconomic dynamics of the Bolivian frontier territory of Antofagasta
(the so called Provincia Litoral), which was inhabited mostly by Chilean rotos,
and whose nitrate resources had been leased to the Compañía de Salitres y
Ferrocarriles de Antofagasta, backed by mixed Chilean-British capital (more on
this in chapter 5).
Of similar historical transcendence is how the porous frontier society between
the Dominican Republic and Haiti, exhibiting a mixed Haitian-Dominican
background and culture, became targeted by the Trujillo administration in 1937,
which manifested in the massacre of thousands of its members in a drive to con-
solidate borders and fix national identities.32 Other, more recent cases include the
border regions of the Patagonia or Araucanía, the original lands of the Mapuche,
where long-lasting connections and crossings survived the imposition of territo-
rial sovereignty by Chile and Argentina;33 and the Miskitu of Central America.
Their kingdom was lost by 1893, when Nicaragua militarily occupied its terri-
tory and forced its incorporation into the national territory. Yet in the 1980s the
Nicaraguan revolutionary state targeted the Miskitu because it resented their
transnational location along the Caribbean coast, which led it to suspect their
commitment to the Sandinista government in Managua.34
Additionally, standing out in recent years is the growing importance of di-
aspora studies that place the binomial of being simultaneously national and
transnational at the center of inquiries into citizenship and its relationship to
the construction and reconstruction of collective identities. In the past, the main
concern of academics studying migration was to follow patterns of sociocultural

integration within national fabrics and the emergence of hyphenated identities of
migrants as both citizens and members of ethnocultural communities. In recent
years, new perspectives have emerged that stress the role of expatriate commu-
nities in both the home countries and the countries of relocation as well as in the
formation of new transnational identities, be they political, religious, or ethnic.35
A paradigmatic case is that of the Caribbean island societies, whose dynamics
of dispersal have raised awareness of the intricacies of diaspora life. Tracing the
new optic on new national spaces in the Spanish Caribbean, historian Blanca
G. Silvestrini indicated that a major challenge of the new historical studies is the
question of borders, blurred by transnational mobility, remittances, and multiple
cultural and physical transfers:
How do we understand nations that are on the move, with large portions of
their population living outside the traditional national boundaries; nations
whose social classes subsist a world apart; national spaces complicated by
Creole languages and linguistic accents and whose people belong to cohorts
that experience the national spaces in radically different terms?36
Only relatively recently have the transnational dimensions seriously been

taken into consideration. Historically, attention focused on how nation-states
defined the nature of citizenship and how the global insertion dictated a pat-
tern of belated, uneven development. The impact of the Cold War and the
subsequent wave of democratization, with their subsequent spillover across
the continent; the massive character of migration and exile; the rising role of
diasporas; and the problematic projection of illegal transborder networks have
changed that perspective. All these processes have promoted an increasing
awareness of the importance of transnational factors in shaping the historical
and contemporary development of Latin American countries and mindfulness
of the impact of those living lives in motion, beyond the boundaries of national
home territories.
The transnational optic has thus reshaped how we approach the societies
in the region, studying how they have interacted with and envisioned each
other, at once in complementary and competitive ways. From that perspective,
we can follow how the national domain has been constructed in tandem with
intellectuals’ and political actors’ reshaping of knowledge, images, and moral
judgment, affecting others transnationally across state borders. Such an ap-
proach calls into question the older ways of approaching Latin American history
by focusing just on separate states or by stressing a postcolonial situation. Adding
to those lines of analysis, important as they are, the transnational perspective
calls attention to a no less important dimension: the persistent yet changing

connections and interactions between states, nations, and societies in the region.
This work suggests that much can be gained by following such a perspective as
we look for clues about the Latin American historical experience, starting with
these societies’ entangled global insertion.
2
Latin American Modernities
Global, Transnational, Uneven, Open-Ended
As a concept used by academics, modernity has been associated with a series

of sociological, political, economic, and cultural trends that altered the forms
of space/time constitution of many societies worldwide. In the Western world,
many conceived of the concept as intimately connected to the development of
new forms of rationality, novel institutional frameworks, capital accumulation,
and mercantile capitalism, starting in the age of discovery and later encompassing
processes of growing urbanization, bureaucratization, rapid transportation, and
communication. Less emphasized, though no less essential, were the imperialist
designs of the core nations of the West, geared both toward global domination
and taking control of human and material resources. As such, modernity shaped
a stratified and hierarchical international system, buttressed by a cultural pro-
gram predicating civilizational superiority over other Latin American societies,
placed in a “trans-European penumbra.”1
Modernity involved both a cultural program and multiple institutional pro-
cesses that affected societies across the world. It involved a forward-looking
attitude, shifts in the conception of human agency, the assumption of a stable
self, a reflexive consciousness geared to innovation, and the creation of new
institutions— trends that would be projected worldwide. Modernity also
exhibited dark sides. Evidence of this is in the ultramarine, imperialist expansion
and colonialist domination of subjugated Native American populations, along
with the enslavement of African populations, accomplished through violence
and with genocidal consequences. Since early colonial times, the legacies of co-
lonialism and internal exclusion continued to shape many aspects of these soci-
eties, as reflected in their institutions, social order, and self-reflection, including
in the religious and cultural domains. Yet one should stress at the outset that
Latin America has also been a pioneer region in which those exclusionary and
discriminatory trends have been contrasted with ideas of republican citizenship,
rights, and social justice.
Accordingly, Latin America has maintained an ambiguous and sometimes
conflict-ridden relationship with the poles of Western development and expan-
sion since colonial times. In spite of such tension-ridden and even contradic-
tory implications, the relatively open-ended character of modernity and its élan
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197605318.003.0003
of material and cultural progress, the promise of expanding access and relative
freedom from traditional and confined ties, have been a major source of appeal
for its upwardly mobile elites and popular sectors. Even if the term “modern”
was seldom claimed by parties or social movements in the region, the plethora
of correlates of modernity has long attracted the imagination and shaped the
agendas of Latin American countries, albeit in varied ways, sometimes wran-
gling with deep concern about their problems and at other times defending their
civilizational standing on the global scene. The correlates of such confrontation
with modernity have ranged from openness to new ideas and technical know-
ledge to republican politics and the crystallization of new collective identities
opened to public opinion and celebration of freedoms.
Atlantic Modernity and Colonialism
In the context of transatlantic development, the uses and analysis of Latin

America in terms of modernity have led to controversy and debate. As these
societies crystallized as a result of Western European colonial expansion and,
once independent, remained for long in a postcolonial bind, the discourse of
modernity—or its translation into notions such as the promotion of civilization
or progress—often has been suspected of being an instrument of what Aníbal
Quijano called the “coloniality of power.”2 Thus, for example, as a political credo,
liberalism was suspected of serving the expansionist drives of capitalist, imperi-
alist, and globalizing interests, starting in the 1920s and acting more forcefully in
later decades.
Many observers that the discourse of modernity served to disguise exploi-
tation and control by external powers and forces over the societies and econo-
mies of the region. Traditionally, these societies have had a marginal position
in global geopolitics; they were at the periphery and semiperiphery of the world
system, to use the terminology of world-system theory. Their geopolitical posi-
tion in the international system was also replicated within each society, through
a series of hierarchical controls aimed at dominating the subaltern classes,
exploiting them and relegating them to the realm of the “traditional,” despising
and marginalizing them.3
The debate on modernity in Latin America is also tied to the question of
whether we can use a generic term to pool together the distinct societies and
states of the region, whose internal structures and developmental trends are as
varied as their external differences. Such use is sometimes contested by those
who claim that the divergent configuration, composition, and institutional
development of these societies do not merit their analysis as part of a suppos-
edly “empty” label created out of Western Europe and North America. Thus, as
Latin American Modernities 25
I tackle the focus of this discussion, I need to address both the ways their moder-
nity or lack thereof can be conceptualized, particularly in connection with glob-
alization, and the lenses through which the societies of Latin America have been
categorized and interpreted. It is to this double task that I turn in this chapter.
The discussion of the relationship between Latin America and the globalizing
trends of modernity has a long tradition in sociology and history, as well as in the
humanities.4 The very rise of the West cannot be explained except in terms of the
multiple colonialist and imperialistic interactions with the Americas and Africa.
For over three centuries, the American territories under consideration turned to
be in the orbit of Iberian and other West European powers and then under the
rising hegemony of the United States, which claimed the name “America” exclu-
sively for itself.
The existence of an Atlantic modernity, to use Jeremy Smith’s term,5 has been
stressed time and again both by scholars of world history and by researchers
of both colonialism and intercivilizational encounters. Even though analysts
differ in their premises and lines of inquiry, claiming that the supporters of
perspectives other than their own ignore the basic lines of structuring of
interactions between the Americas and the centers of world development,
diverging scholars nonetheless converge in recognizing the centrality of such
interactions in enabling or even triggering modernity. In other words, even if
working from distinct perspectives, there is widespread support for the view
that modernity as an expanding structural phenomenon—with all its new
forms of space/time constitution—started with the so-called discovery and set-
tlement of the Americas.6
In contrast, the uneven development and sociopolitical configuration of the
region led some observers to question the seemingly globalized and modern
Western physiognomy the societies of Latin America exhibited, which their
leaders often professed to endorse. This awareness brought a number of scholars
and activists to challenge the truisms about Latin America being part of a uni-
versal mode of modernity and ask the question in a bold way: “[W]‌hen [and
where] was Latin American modern?”7 Historian Alan Knight even asserted that
the concept of modernity is not of much help as a heuristic device for under-
standing Latin America, unless we define it in terms of a discernible set of ideas
associated with the Enlightenment, rationalism, secularism, humanism, and ma-
terialism, and measure how these survived in Latin America, “like galaxies in the
void of space.”8 Other scholars, such as political scientist Laurence Whitehead,
have claimed otherwise. Namely, they have suggested that Latin Americans’ self-
constructions are projected as belonging to the West and accordingly have been
wide open to modern ideas and innovations. This has distinguished this region
from others in the Global South, in that the notions and expectations associ-
ated with what we understand as modernity have rather early “become part of
the ‘tacit knowledge’ used by local actors and their external interlocutors alike in
their routine praxis.”9
In order to assess what modernity has denoted in Latin America, I next re-
view the constructs and images attributed to the region, subsequently addressing
the frames and perspectives on modernity in the region and their relationship to
global processes taking place on the world scene.
Latin America and Its Multiple Modernities
Beginning in the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the image of Latin
America was often assembled by contrasting the historical reality in the region
with a stylized ideal of Western societies, so that Latin America emerged as
exhibiting a long history of pathologies and dwarfed institutions. Sometimes this
even occurred in the form of a caricature, as in the image of “banana republics”
attributed to Central America. Latin American intellectuals also fell into the trap
of sometimes depicting European and North American societies in an idealized
way, even if the latter were “as littered with grandiose but ultimately incomplete
modernization projects [as] Latin America.”10 As James Dunkerley showed in
Americana, from very early on there were mutual flawed constructions of these
societies’ images, both across the Atlantic and along the North-South axis in the
Americas.11
The discourses of modernity and the debates around them addressing Latin
America in many ways resemble earlier discussions on the program of moder-
nity as envisaged by the Enlightenment in Europe, yet they go beyond them
by stressing that the category of Western modernity does not fully encompass
their historical path. For instance, Latin America shared with the United States
a sense of being a land of utopia, a promised land, the target of dreams, a land
of open opportunities, which was built up around the ideals and expectations
of the Enlightenment and even pioneered its implications for expanding liberty,
equality, and universal fraternity.12
Due to their historical configuration, the societies of Latin America are and are
not part of the West. They have endorsed modern notions of republicanism, cit-
izenship, representative democracy, civic associations, elections, public debate
and public spheres, justice, and equality before the law, wrangling with them as
part of their own colonial traumatic origins. Yet at the same time, these soci-
eties have had distinctive cultural-demographic setups, developing specific
institutional trends and notions and adapting political ideas as they took over
positions of power, often betraying those ideas to be able to rule in societies that
also opened their public arenas to wider social strata, at least de facto. From a
worldwide perspective, they have pioneered notions of modern republicanism,
social justice, and human rights, even if many observers in the Global North
have ignored these trends, depicting Latin America as a caricature of itself or
overlooking these trends’ eclectic, multiple, and varied manifestations.
Human societies differ widely, due not only to their structural setup but also
to the different civilizing and soteriological visions that infuse life in society
with meaning. While comparing societies, we should recognize—as Ernest
Gellner reminds us—that various societies have developed different answers
and solutions to the same questions about human existence and life in society.13
Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Jóhann Páll Árnason, and other scholars have defined
such a view as a perspective of multiple modernities, entailing the idea that while
modernity could be viewed as a distinct civilization, related to distinct institu-
tional trends in politics and the economy, it has unfolded in multiple patterns
worldwide. As a distinct civilization, modernity evinces certain premises, among
which stand out a continuous reconstruction of roles and identities, a growing
autonomy from ascribed frameworks, an increased reflexivity, and the decline of
markers of certainty. Yet that program of modernity has met with varied forms of
contestation, appropriation, and transformation, thus creating not one but mul-
tiple patterns of modernity. In other words, as it turned global, modernity became
plural. Even those movements that usually claim to fight modernity and pred-
icate a fundamentalist return to pristine culture—for example, contemporary
Islamic radicalism—are in fact redefining the meanings of their path into the
global scene, which is none other than modern.14
In this framework, it is important to stress that—beyond all the colonial and
postcolonial violence, as well as the mercantilist and capitalist integration into
world circuits as producers of primary wealth ranging from minerals to cattle
products, crops, and consumers of manufactured products—the societies of
Latin America have developed global, multiple, and yet often truncated modern-
ities. These tendencies started to develop very early throughout the region, albeit
at different rhythms. From their very inception, elites connected those societies
to external centers and global circuits, as part of the economic and political, reli-
gious, cultural, and ideological centers of an emerging Atlantic modernity.
Atlantic modernity attempted to replace and obliterate— with variable
success—the memory of successive imperial waves of autochthonous modern-
ization. Those previous waves are epitomized in the astronomical discoveries of
the Maya, the advanced uses of landscape and urban design by the Aztecs, and
the forward-looking modes of redistribution of agricultural surpluses and sym-
bolic organization of space and society orchestrated by the Incan political center.
In this sense, we should consider Western-originated globalization another cycle
in an ongoing process triggered by earlier imperial expansions and reinforced by
the shifting and expanding unfolding of the capitalist system, a process neither
peculiar nor limited to recent and contemporary historical conditions.15
A kind of global awareness crystallized and provided parameters of institu-

tional building and reflection in these societies, led by upper classes and elites
who thought they were pioneering new ideas and practices, while struggling
with and subjugating subaltern populations as they envisioned being part of the
upward mobile strata of Atlantic modernity.16
Yet while imagining themselves as taking part in Atlantic modernity,
these elites soon realized that their demographics and identities, their social
problématique and the construction of political order, were not identical to those
of Europe. Being at the crossroads of Western European expansion into the New
World, individuals in the Americas realized very early on that their experience
differed from that of their Old World contemporaries. Many of the descendants
of non-Western civilizations, such as the peoples of the Inca Empire, the his-
torical Maya kingdoms, and the forcibly displaced members of African socie-
ties enslaved in the Americas, attempted to keep their cultural distinctiveness
alive. Those arriving from Europe and their Creole descendants could not avoid
reflecting on the distinctiveness of their new social environment, even as they
attempted to share the culture, values, and lifestyles that Iberians followed in the
peninsula.
By being in a different world, interacting with others not found in the socie-
ties of origin or in precolonial times, along with being exposed to diverse tastes,
illnesses, sounds, and sights that triggered awareness of such differences, neither
settlers nor subject populations could avoid considering that their markers of
certainty did not fit exactly those of the “mother countries.” Whether supporting
social and moral principles that they considered universally valid or particular
to them, the experience of the New World gave rise to reflexivity, rebellion, and
struggle, typical of modern contexts and frames of mind.
This reflexivity had global referents, yet underwent a twist as these soci-
eties entered fully the period of construction of self- constituted— mostly
republican—polities in the nineteenth century and went through new trans-
formations in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even very early in
colonial times, there were several sources of reflexivity. First, the colonists were
part of multiple frameworks of identity, of expansive powers that were in fact
just a composite of monarchies, to use John H. Elliott’s depiction of Spain, and of
intersecting and diverse ways of life.17 This prompted intersectionality and pre-
cluded the formation of uniform criteria of membership. Rather, crosscutting
criteria prevailed: being Catholic; being subjects of a composite monarchy ruling
over different kingdoms; being members of local settlements and yet separated
by their standing in social hierarchies; being Whites and non-Whites; and being
free, semi-free, and non-free individuals, among many other criteria.18
Elites interpreted those criteria in a nonorthodox manner, creating an elas-
ticity that the distance from the centers of power in the Iberian Peninsula shaped
into a persistent gap between the letter of the law and its implementation for cen-
turies to come. For example, while in theory non-Christians could not migrate to
the Americas, in practice many (among them crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims)
crossed the Atlantic and became members of local communities, especially
during Castile’s annexation of Portugal between 1580 and 1640.19 Similarly, as
Tamar Herzog has shown, while there was a distinction between Whites and
non-Whites, the criteria were not strictly racial, but rather embedded biological
considerations within cultural and socioeconomic cultural traits, “thus allowing
dark-skinned people to become ‘White’ and ‘darkening’ [some of] those with a
fair complexion.”20
This trend of crosscutting criteria of membership and multiple
intersectionality, as well as the gap between social practices and formal insti-
tutional rules, which were always subject to negotiation, persisted in various
forms well into contemporary times. The result has been the recreation of dy-
namics of confrontation and debate between “purists”—be they conservatives,
liberals, or revolutionaries attempting to reach power—and the more pragmatic
orientations that, once they reached power, social and political forces adopted,
even betraying the ideals they had held before.
Adding complexity was miscegenation, religious syncretism, and emerging
hybrid identities. In Spanish and Portuguese America, peoples and traditions
from Europe, the Americas, and Africa met on unequal ground, yet they
impinged upon one another from the start. Hierarchical domination and colo-
nial controls were imposed on subaltern sectors by a minority of conquerors,
settlers, and patrons. However, societies became complex very early on, due to
factors such as the gender ratio of colonizers to the colonized and the sequel gen-
erations of mixed offspring, the dynamics of mutual accommodation and negoti-
ation, the distance from the metropolitan centers of power, and the frontier-like
character of settlements dispersed in territories larger than anything known in
the Old World. Thus, despite the destruction of earlier social systems, annihi-
lation of entire populations, and shattering of aboriginal cultures, the conquest
and colonization of the Americas opened room for syncretism and alternative
modes of identity formation.
Challenges were common from very early on, originating in the descendants
of the settlers; the heirs of native nobility; the Indian commoners; the slaves,
runaway slaves, and freemen; and the growing sectors of mixed backgrounds.
Miscegenation (mestizaje) implied much disappointment for those eager to
climb the upper echelons of the social hierarchy, yet integrationist images
did not disappear but rather merely amalgamated in new forms as part of the
Bolivarian and republican ethos that became dominant in the nineteenth cen-
tury.21 Since then, and into the twenty-first century, miscegenation has become a
pervasive trait that has generated ambiguity, in tandem with religious syncretism
and hybrid structures, all constituting major trends in the social composition,
the stereotypes and discrimination of subaltern sectors, and their collective re-
flexive images. In the heyday of racism, miscegenation prompted doubts about
the ability of these societies to embrace “civilization,” while mixed demographics
proved to be key in producing more assertive visions of self-representation such
as those of the raza cósmica in twentieth-century postrevolutionary Mexico or
the homem cordial in republican Brazil. Such visions condensed sets of values
deemed by elites to be crucial for maintaining social unity and order under real-
life conditions of disaggregation, submerging conflicts and containing violence.
Another axis of reflexivity involved the continuous questioning of and need for
legitimizing societies’ collective identity, which was in part triggered by cultural
transformations and the internal controversies led by various parts of colonial
and postcolonial society, and due also to inter-European struggles such as those
centered on the so-called Black Legend of the conquest of America. In the eight-
eenth century, Americans found themselves increasingly entangled in contro-
versies about the nature of their societies. Some, like the Jesuits exiled to Europe,
looked for the indigenous roots of the distinctive American identities and tried
to establish the image of Aztecs and Incas as civilized nations far more advanced
than the Romans in Gaul and England.22 In this endeavor, those authors con-
tinued a line perhaps initiated by Bartolomé de las Casas and Peter Martyr’s let-
ters (which influenced Montaigne’s and Europe’s mythical image of the “noble
savage” in the sixteenth century). As analyzed in detail by Antonello Gerbi and
Leopoldo Zea, the displaced Jesuits were opposing Europeans who, seduced by
visions of their Enlightenment, portrayed the New World as a feeble version of
Europe.23 Whether defending or deploring the condition of the Americas and
their people, or struggling to uphold the seemingly “pristine values” of their
countries, those Jesuits—like many in the Western Hemisphere—thought them-
selves part of a global scenario, and as such reflected on their place among world
societies.
The perception of those growing up in the Americas underwent many changes
in the following centuries, while at the same time the view of being part of a
globalizing trend of modernity persisted. The sense of tilting toward modernity,
however, came with an awareness of difference, lending itself to what we now de-
fine as part of a road of multiple modernities. At the core of this approach is the
view that these societies combined a global insertion, being fully integrated into
world circuits, and sharing with other societies in the West basic premises of po-
litical and economic order, while simultaneously evolving their own path. In the
case of Mexico, anthropologist Claudio Lomnitz defined this path as that of an
“Indian modernity.”24
Collective identities are predicated on a varied mixture of universal and
particularistic themes, symbols, and representations.25 In 1810, the American
delegates complained of injustice when the Cortes of Cádiz did not fully take into
account the size of the American population—unlike that of Spaniards residing
in the peninsula—in determining the number of representatives. The argument
used was that, as the indigenous population was said to lack an education, they
could not be considered full members of a civilized society. As the American ter-
ritories disengaged from the Spanish monarchy and the political classes promul-
gated independence, they adopted republican models of political organization
and resorted to the mythology of claiming to be descendants of Incas, Aztecs,
and others, as the basis for their claimed legitimacy, mainly—yet not only—in
the areas densely populated by indigenous peoples. Contrasting their republican
polities based on democratic principles with the monarchical and despotic turn
of Europe after 1815, they portrayed pre-Columbian civilizations as models of
political wisdom, tolerance, and even individualism.26
Since then, Latin American societies have tended to downplay the primor-
dial elements in their collective representation, giving primacy to civil-political
criteria of full membership. Political actors and intellectuals split over how to
integrate the indigenous populations and whether to respect their communal or-
ganization or suppress it forcefully in the name of universal inclusion, with the
covert agenda of taking over their lands. In Mexico or Paraguay, national identi-
ties were constructed around the idea of fusion of races (or languages in the latter
case), intimately connected to images of Latin Americanism and universalism.27
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social Darwinism had bent
earlier paternalistic indigenism into a more racialized vision of unequal races.
Nonetheless, social and revolutionary struggles launched expansive cycles of
recognition. Starting with the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s, societies would
again assert the symbolic salience of their autochthonous roots, reaching by the
late twentieth century a cycle of official recognition in the “aspirational constitu-
tionalism” of countries such as Colombia, Bolivia, and Ecuador, which amended
and redrafted their constitutions in the spirit of plurinationalism. In these and
other cases, the basic charters followed a future-oriented perspective, without
necessarily being a reflection of their present situations. According to Mauricio
García Villegas, who coined the term, aspirational constitutionalism thrives in
situations of inconformity with the present and a strong aspiration for a change
and a better situation in the future. In that future-oriented option, the drafters
hoped that the promulgated clauses would become reality, even if that depended
on the commitment of political forces and social movements, the mobilization of
public opinion, and a judicial activism aimed at making them effective.28
Latin American symbolic self-representations also drew on other images.
Sometimes those representations reflected the imposing nature of landscapes,
which were immortalized among others in the Canto general (1950) of Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda, and the universal aspirations of important sectors in these
societies, which prompted a continuous search for universal models of devel-

opment and institutionalization. The universal, global orientation implied a
tension between political ideas and the social and political dynamics—either
demographic-cultural or socioeconomic-geopolitical—that, at various histor-
ical moments, were interpreted as placing these societies at a structural disad-
vantage vis-à-vis other societies of the expanding global system.
As soon as these societies attained political independence, their elites saw
themselves at the forefront of modern world politics, as independent, mostly re-
publican states. As Eduardo Posada-Carbó and Iván Jaksić pointed out in a com-
prehensive historiographical essay, the early nineteenth-century Hispanic liberal
wave constituted a third revolution, after that which had occurred in the thir-
teen North American colonies and the French Revolution. Following Armando
Martínez Garnica, Posada-Carbó and Jaksić indicated that the liberal agenda
covered a wide programmatic spectrum: freedom of the press, division of

powers, popular sovereignty and representative government, abolition of
privileges and legal exemptions (fueros), elimination of Indian tribute, manu-
mission of slaves, and constitutional designs that in New Granada, Venezuela,
and Chile actually preceded the liberal [Spanish] Constitution of Cádiz in
1812.29
However, as there was little division of labor between intellectuals and politicians
in the nineteenth century, while that ideology served those elites aspiring to
reach power, “once in power Liberals found themselves confronted with their
own convictions,”30 adapting those ideas into a mere instrument of power and
sometimes even betraying them. Unsurprisingly, a basic tension crystallized be-
tween their optimistic future-oriented outlook, on the one hand, and the ensuing
deep sense that modernity did not fully develop but rather was truncated, on the
other, along with a growing reason for concern due to the current state of their
societies. Simón Bolívar the “Liberator” expressed such concerns as his conscious
effort to create a liberal nation composed of “good citizens” seemed to fail.31 Due
to the particular modes of insertion into the global system and configuration
of rather open public spheres in the process of detachment from Spanish rule
and subsequent civil wars, many of the high expectations led to a sense of disap-
pointment and lack of fulfillment, witnessing impaired accomplishments and a
peripheral standing surrounded by the global scene. Yet it is worth stressing that
such a sense inhered in the character of the ideals they had pioneered and pined
to materialize. Moreover, liberalism had long-term consequences, as reflected
in the emancipation of slaves in most countries—with the exception of Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and Brazil—at the latest around the mid-nineteenth century, before
US abolition, which took a major war to occur.
In the nineteenth century, as they emerged from the initial wave of revolu-
tionary wars, Latin American states pioneered Enlightenment ideas of republi-
canism, democratic practice, and social rights, and tried to implement them as
an alternative to European old regime institutions and practices. Posada-Carbó
and Jaksić called attention to the initial pull of that philosophy in 1808–25, with
lasting impact in the nineteenth century. James Dunkerley and James E. Sanders,
among others, have analyzed liberalism there as the model adopted for shaping
the future in Central America and for Mexico, Colombia, and Uruguay in the
1840s to 1870s, respectively. Elites and sectors participating in the public sphere
imagined Latin America in future-oriented terms and through the prisms of civ-
ilization and modernity, envisioning a universal and global project. Grounding
that initial organization was the principle of popular sovereignty, based on which
they claimed legitimacy for the new states in the name of republican represen-
tation. Even in provincial areas, such as Yucatán in Mexico, there was already a
buoyant celebration of progress in the mid-1840s, as traced by James Dunkerley:
We have literary, scientific, commercial and political journals. There are today
in Mérida philanthropic societies, reading groups and scientific academies.
Pioneering businesses have triumphed; we have a stagecoach network, cafés,
hotels and recreational associations. Primary education has acquired new en-
ergy; the government is improving and makes efforts to develop agriculture;
roads have been built and repaired. In short, we are on the road to progress.32
Similarly, James E. Sanders pointed out how biased and prejudiced the often
accepted master narrative that Latin America remade itself in the image of
Europe has been, when in fact Latin America, at least in part of the nineteenth
century, developed what he calls a “countervision of modernity,” seeing itself as
embodying “the future”:
A Mexican provincial newspaper argued that instilling “democracy” and

“having triumphed among us the latest progresses of human learning” had
“made us equal to the old civilizations” of Europe. . . . [Francisco Bilbao]
proclaimed that Europe, lacking true liberty . . . would have to wait for [Latin]
America “to regenerate the spirit of Old Europe.”33
At one point the elites proclaimed that vision as a means for the construction
and reconstruction of their nations within the framework of innovation while
addressing Iberian and European ideas, and they saw themselves as starting an
open-ended path of renewal of ideas and institutional innovation.34 Liberalism
had to contend with conservative ideas and with the persistent power and ap-
peal of Catholicism among wide sectors of the population, leading to most
violent confrontations and civil wars, for example in Colombia. Liberalism came
under attack and underwent various up-and-down cycles, with different coun-
tries diverging in its rhythms and impact, though generally declining toward the
1920s. However, some of the ideals it introduced can be identified as reemerging
as a discursive tool for those resisting and censuring the repressive regimes of the
1970s to 1980s, and even influencing the rhetoric of populist and revolutionary
movements predicating alternative paths of modernity.
With the passing of time, and as societies engaged in internal struggles
and civil wars and lagged behind in institutional and economic develop-
ment, it became common to view the problems of truncated modernity in
terms of an internal fight around progress or, as epitomized in the renowned
work of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, of civilization against barbarity. When
Sarmiento wrote Civilización y barbarie (1845), he was fully aware of the French
periodical literature of his period; knew the work of historians such as Guizot,
Michelet, and Thierry; and in his prologue observed that South America as yet
lacked a work comparable to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America,
which was published only shortly before Sarmiento’s piece.35 According to him,
the political conditions of independence created an environment in which only
the despotism of harsh caudillos could prevent society from lapsing into civil
war, anarchy, and banditry. Yet such despotic order was inimical to progress and
indeed expressed a struggle between rural caudillismo and urban culture, with
Buenos Aires as the epitome of future order and civilization. Both Sarmiento
and his critics (e.g., Juan Bautista Alberdi) agreed that their country should
emulate European paths to civilization, drawn by the binary opposition be-
tween liberal progress—as exemplified by France, Great Britain, and the United
States—and Catholic Spain, the source of conservatism and stagnation in the
Americas.36
Throughout Latin America, seclusion from global forces and currents was
in most cases not considered an option, and seclusion from neighboring sister
nations and states or provinces was a structural impossibility. Elites purposely
looked to maintain a dialogue with the ideas and practices of Western moder-
nity, not mimicking them, but rather adapting them eclectically and innovating
according to their own experience.37 The reflexive concern with the inner fabric
and dynamic of their societies led them to develop ideas and practices in their
own way. Threatened by the presence of the masses, once in power, liberalism
soon turned elitist (“moderate”), whereas conservatism admitted the caducity
of some of the old regime’s ideological foundations. The rather conservative vein
of liberalism (lacking much of the pragmatic orientation that it exhibited in the
United States) and the liberal vein of conservatism agreed on the need to lead
change. They differed mainly in the pace and agency of the change and the prog-
ress they envisioned: Would history dictate organically the rhythm of change, as
claimed by Latin American conservatives, or should social forces promote it ac-

tively, imprinting a progressive shift in history, as claimed by liberals?
Later on, as civil wars waned and institutional stability could be foreseen, the
drive toward modernity continued in societies that had turned elitist and oli-
garchic. Positivism was adopted—more Comtean and authoritarian in Mexico,
Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela, and more Spencerian and Darwinian in Argentina,
Uruguay, and Colombia—for its promise of order toward the consecution of in-
dustrial and scientific progress. Likewise, as positivism was adopted in the re-
gion, its corollaries underwent transformations. Whereas in Europe positivism
became connected with racist trends, in Latin America it predicated progress
through miscegenation and assimilation of subaltern sectors into a “Creole race,”
a process to be pursued by whatever means, even by force or by replacement—
that is, by welcoming massive flows of immigrants.38
At times the lack of signs of progress induced pessimism and a sense of failure.
Elites followed, interacted, and hoped to have an impact on global models and
ideas, turning them into institutional guides and converting Latin America into
what Laurence Whitehead has called a “mausoleum of modernities.” This notion
conveys the idea that each wave of modernity reached a truncated end or just re-
inforced previous imbalances in society and was soon followed by another wave
of innovation and new ideas struggling to accomplish the uneven fulfillment of
the promises of modernity.
Historian Tulio Halperin Donghi also stressed that intellectual and polit-
ical elites incorporated selectively ideas and modern institutions as they coped
with specific challenges in their societies.39 In connection with Brazil, Roberto
Schwarz once questioned whether these modern epitomes were merely “ideas
out of place.”40 We may assume that due to their global immersion, leading elites
and social strata used globally fashionable idioms and symbolic markers to inter-
pret reality and compete for political power and cultural hegemony, often trans-
lating these notions into oppressive forms of domination of the subaltern groups,
yet meeting a continuing struggle of civil sectors demanding greater equality and
social justice. As these struggles took place in societies that differed from those
in which the ideas originally crystallized, the cultural lenses themselves shifted
and metamorphosed into more eclectic—or perhaps I should say “multiple”—
frameworks of analysis.
It is important to realize that even if most Latin American projects of mo-
dernity had external referents, they were not necessarily derivative, as stressed
by Nicola Miller in her analysis of key intellectual figures of the early twentieth
century in the region:
In any case, the creation of the Latin American ‘other’ was as complex and var-
iegated as its creation of self: these intellectuals sought inspiration not only
from Britain, France, and the United States, but also from Russia, Spain, Italy,
Germany, Japan, China, Australia, and New Zealand. Experiences within Latin
America were also crucial: Buenos Aires became a touchstone of modernity for
the rest of Latin America; after the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920, Mexico
City became another major point of reference. All advocates of modernity in
Latin America have made reference to external examples—as often as not, in
order to illustrate what not to do.41
Also crucial was the transnational communication and exchange of ideas be-
tween nationals of different societies that shared the same language, had a
common past, and faced similar challenges in the present, which prompted
learning from each other. Illustrative of this is how, in the nineteenth century,
South American historians participated in a republic of letters, as Argentine his-
torian Bartolomé Mitre maintained an active exchange with Chilean Benjamín
Vicuña Mackenna after they spent time together in prison, and with Diego
Barros Arana; the latter was in contact with Colombian José María Restrepo, and
Restrepo with Venezuelan Rafael María Baralt. Bolivian Gabriel René-Moreno
studied with Chilean Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Peruvian Felipe Paz Soldán
maintained an exchange with Mitre and Vicuña Mackenna, and Ecuatorian
Federico González Suárez was in contact with Colombian José Manuel Groot.42
In addition, Spanish and Latin American liberals maintained an active political
and cultural dialogue, particularly in the 1857–86 period,43 laying the ground for
a pan-Hispanic revival in parts of the twentieth century.
The transnational gaze of sister nations also explains why multiple societies
entered cycles of authoritarianism or democratization, as they contemplated the
experience and policy decisions and calibration of those nations. For example,
such a bias was evident in the last wave of democratization, as societies in the
region maintained a mutual gaze, learning from each other’s experiences trans-
nationally as they faced similar challenges. When the Southern Cone societies
shifted away from repressive authoritarianism and embraced civilian democ-
racy, they all confronted similar grim legacies of human rights violations. Each
society looked for precedents and tried to assess the adequacy of the institu-
tional path followed by the other countries, finding inspiration and recognizing
dangers while observing and interpreting the experience of the others, as I dis-
cuss in greater detail in c hapter 7.44
The idiom of Western modernity did not go unchallenged, in part due to the
inner ambivalence between liberty and equality, and between representation and
participation, yet also as alternative traditions coexisted with the mainstream
patterns of organization in the Americas. Among them, indigenous traditions
that persisted over time, even if it took time to fully recognize their concepts
of “good living” and sustainable development—for example, Andean sumak
kawsay, suma qamaña, and allin kawsay—appeared in official charters and in

multicultural and intercultural directions, including education and alternative
medicine, as research by David Lehmann, Deby Babis, and John Stolle-McAllister
has shown45 African beliefs, customs, rhythms, and flavors were contributed by
the uprooted descendants of forced laborers and slaves. In addition, a range of
ideological views was brought by immigrants as they arrived massively in the
second half of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth centuries. More
recently, various postmodern forms of social disaggregation, misinformation,
and disinformation have added complexity as well.
The confrontation between elite imagination and those alternative
perspectives has been a long- lasting experience in Hispanic America and
Lusoamerica. We can trace it back to as early as colonial times as it spread
through a wide variety of realms, most importantly, however, as a religious quest
for salvation.46 It acquired new forms in the last two centuries, as elites faced
contradictions between their models of political legitimacy (ordered according
to republican and liberal principles) and the mechanisms necessary for govern-
ance (which included concentration of powers in the executive and the use of
clientelism). This confrontation can be followed as well in the reactions to the
implementation of positivist and capitalist ideas and developmental models, as
seen in peasant revolts; in a full-fledged social and political revolution in Mexico
in the 1910s and 1920s; and subsequently in the 1952 Bolivian Revolution, the
1979 Sandinista Revolution, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. Many of
these trends were rephrased in the idioms and markers of new ideologies, bor-
rowing from and changing Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism in the
spirit of indigenous and Afro-American grievances.
A crucial aspect of the indigenous models has been the quest for the protection
of collective ownership of lands rooted in the collective memory of the Andean
Tahuantinsuyu and the Mesoamerican regions, which provided a strong source
of resistance to the capitalist encroachment and privatization of lands. Driven by
this logic of pre-Columbian origins, even modernists such as Peruvians Pedro
Zulen and José Carlos Mariátegui in the early twentieth century, concerned
with progress and development and attuned to global idioms, were able to tran-
scend the European bias of their ideologies. Both rephrased their ideas in terms
of the revolutionary potential they identified in the indigenista movements of
Peru. Later on, radical movements such as the Shining Path in Peru embraced
those ideas, although in a very authoritarian and violent manner. Similar trends
of confrontation, connected with the decline of support for liberal democracy
and neoliberal policies, have been developing more recently in different ways in
Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Central America.47
The backlash against macroeconomic adjustment policies, which elites
embraced in the 1990s to face the crisis created by economic stagnation, inflation,
and debt-ridden budgets, and which openly discarded the étatist legacies of ear-
lier decades, soon erupted, not only in the countries already mentioned. The
backlash was directed against both the economic policies and, in many countries,
the liberal principles of representative democracy that seemed to have failed to
lead the countries into more than a truncated pattern of modernity and develop-
ment. The policies of macroeconomic stabilization and liberalization disman-
tled corporatist frameworks of representation, curtailed subsidies, changed the
regulation of labor markets, and affected rural communal lands. Unsurprisingly,
indigenous and popular movements rose to fight those policies and even depose
rulers, after denouncing their policies and mobilizing transcommunal support
for alternative models of development opposed to neoliberal privatization and
changes in labor conditions. In some countries, such as Venezuela, the reaction
was potent. Carlos Andrés Pérez, a respected president in the 1970s, the years
of the oil bonanza, was again elected as head of state in the late 1980s. As he
started his presidential term (1989–94), Pérez implemented major economic
reforms supported by the International Monetary Fund, despite having insisted
as a candidate that he would not bend to the IMF prescriptions. The neoliberal
policies he adopted dramatically increased the cost of gas and public transporta-
tion, and the impact came in February 1989 in the form of nine days of protests,
rioting, vandalism, and shootings, known as the Caracazo.48 The security forces
and the military repressed the protests forcefully, with hundreds of casualties.
Soon Colonel Hugo Chávez organized a secret cell within the military, known
as MBR-200, and launched a short-lived, failed coup in February 1992. After
he landed in prison, his actions made him a martyr-like, revolutionary leader
for many, particularly lower class citizens, After his release, Chávez continued
building support until 1998, when he won the presidency with 56 percent of the
vote. With his reaching power in Venezuela, the backlash against neoliberal pol-
icies spread transnationally through the region, this time linked to the renewed
appeal of leftist and socialist ideas, while the state remained as étatist, polarizing,
and mobilizing as the classical populist precedents of past generations.49
This analysis indicates that these societies patterned their political institutions
and public spheres according to models that they considered the epitome of
global progress and advanced modernity. Second, it suggests that the multiple
models of modernity became hybrid in Latin America, due to the tensions in
their inner logic and between such logic and their subordination to local his-
tory and prevailing social and political patterns. Third, in this process moder-
nity often appeared truncated; accordingly, the carriers of models of modernity
struggled to impose their vision of global insertion upon wider sectors, com-
peting with each other and with the carriers of indigenous models in the sym-
bolic arenas. Fourth, the policies adopted by the upper classes and those in power
generated strong countervailing forces that contested the visions and policies
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“Did it strike you as strange,” asked Markham, “that Von Blon was
not at his office during the commission of either of the crimes?”
“At first—yes. But, after all, there was nothing unusual in the fact
that a doctor should have been out at that time of night.”
“It’s easy enough to see how Ada got rid of Julia and Chester,”
grumbled Heath. “But what stops me is how she murdered Rex.”
“Really, y’ know, Sergeant,” returned Vance, “that trick of hers
shouldn’t cause you any perplexity. I’ll never forgive myself for not
having guessed it long ago,—Ada certainly gave us enough clews to
work on. But, before I describe it to you, let me recall a certain
architectural detail of the Greene mansion. There is a Tudor
fireplace, with carved wooden panels, in Ada’s room, and another
fireplace—a duplicate of Ada’s—in Rex’s room; and these two
fireplaces are back to back on the same wall. The Greene house, as
you know, is very old, and at some time in the past—perhaps when
the fireplaces were built—an aperture was made between the two
rooms, running from one of the panels in Ada’s mantel to the
corresponding panel in Rex’s mantel. This miniature tunnel is about
six inches square—the exact size of the panels—and a little over two
feet long, or the depth of the two mantels and the wall. It was
originally used, I imagine, for private communication between the
two rooms. But that point is immaterial. The fact remains that such a
shaft exists—I verified it to-night on my way down-town from the
hospital. I might also add that the panel at either end of the shaft is
on a spring hinge, so that when it is opened and released it closes
automatically, snapping back into place without giving any indication
that it is anything more than a solid part of the woodwork——”
“I get you!” exclaimed Heath, with the excitement of satisfaction.
“Rex was shot by the old man-killing safe idea: the burglar opens the
safe door and gets a bullet in his head from a stationary gun.”
“Exactly. And the same device has been used in scores of
murders. In the early days out West an enemy would go to a
rancher’s cabin during the tenant’s absence, hang a shotgun from
the ceiling over the door, and tie one end of a string to the trigger
and the other end to the latch. When the rancher returned—perhaps
days later—his brains would be blown out as he entered his cabin;
and the murderer would, at the time, be in another part of the
country.”
“Sure!” The Sergeant’s eyes sparkled. “There was a shooting like
that in Atlanta two years ago—Boscomb was the name of the
murdered man. And in Richmond, Virginia——”
“There have been many instances of it, Sergeant. Gross quotes
two famous Austrian cases, and also has something to say about
this method in general.”
Again he opened the “Handbuch.”
“On page 943 Gross remarks: ‘The latest American safety
devices have nothing to do with the safe itself, and can in fact be
used with any receptacle. They act through chemicals or automatic
firing devices, and their object is to make the presence of a human
being who illegally opens the safe impossible on physical grounds.
The judicial question would have to be decided whether one is
legally entitled to kill a burglar without further ado or damage his
health. However, a burglar in Berlin in 1902 was shot through the
forehead by a self-shooter attached to a safe in an exporting house.
This style of self-shooter has also been used by murderers. A
mechanic, G. Z., attached a pistol in a china-closet, fastening the
trigger to the catch, and thus shot his wife when he himself was in
another city. R. C., a merchant of Budapest, fastened a revolver in a
humidor belonging to his brother, which, when the lid was opened,
fired and sent a bullet into his brother’s abdomen. The explosion
jerked the box from the table, and thus exposed the mechanism
before the merchant had a chance to remove it.’38 . . . In both these
latter cases Gross gives a detailed description of the mechanisms
employed. And it will interest you, Sergeant—in view of what I am
about to tell you—to know that the revolver in the china-closet was
held in place by a Stiefelknecht, or bootjack.”
He closed the volume but held it on his lap.
“There, unquestionably, is where Ada got the suggestion for
Rex’s murder. She and Rex had probably discovered the hidden
passageway between their rooms years ago. I imagine that as
children—they were about the same age, don’t y’ know—they used it
as a secret means of correspondence. This would account for the
name by which they both knew it—‘our private mail-box.’ And, given
this knowledge between Ada and Rex, the method of the murder
becomes perfectly clear. To-night I found an old-fashioned bootjack
in Ada’s clothes-closet—probably taken from Tobias’s library. Its
width, overall, was just six inches, and it was a little less than two
feet long—it fitted perfectly into the communicating cupboard. Ada,
following Gross’s diagram, pressed the handle of the gun tightly
between the tapering claws of the bootjack, which would have held it
like a vise; then tied a string to the trigger, and attached the other
end to the inside of Rex’s panel, so that when the panel was opened
wide the revolver, being on a hair-trigger, would discharge straight
along the shaft and inevitably kill any one looking into the opening.
When Rex fell with a bullet in his forehead the panel flapped back
into place on its spring hinge; and a second later there was no visible
evidence whatever pointing to the origin of the shot. And here we
also have the explanation for Rex’s calm expression of
unawareness. When Ada returned with us from the District Attorney’s
office, she went directly to her room, removed the gun and the
bootjack, hid them in her closet, and came down to the drawing-
room to report the foot-tracks on her carpet—foot-tracks she herself
had made before leaving the house. It was just before she came
down-stairs, by the way, that she stole the morphine and strychnine
from Von Blon’s case.”
“But, my God, Vance!” said Markham. “Suppose her mechanism
had failed to work. She would have been in for it then.”
“I hardly think so. If, by any remote chance, the trap had not
operated or Rex had recovered, she could easily have put the blame
on some one else. She had merely to say she had secreted the
diagram in the chute and that this other person had prepared the
trap later on. There would have been no proof of her having set the
gun.”
“What about that diagram, sir?” asked Heath.
For answer Vance again took up the second volume of Gross
and, opening it, extended it toward us. On the right-hand page were
a number of curious line-drawings, which I reproduce here.
“There are the three stones, and the parrot, and the heart, and
even your arrow, Sergeant. They’re all criminal graphic symbols; and
Ada simply utilized them in her description. The story of her finding
the paper in the hall was a pure fabrication, but she knew it would
pique our curiosity. The truth is, I suspected the paper of being faked
by some one, for it evidently contained the signs of several types of
criminal, and the symbols were meaninglessly jumbled. I rather
imagined it was a false clew deliberately placed in the hall for us to
find—like the footprints; but I certainly didn’t suspect Ada of having
made up the tale. Now, however, as I look back at the episode it
strikes me as deuced queer that she shouldn’t have brought so
apparently significant a paper to the office. Her failure to do so was
neither logical nor reasonable; and I ought to have been suspicious.
But—my word!—what was one illogical item more or less in such a
mélange of inconsistencies? As it happened, her decoy worked
beautifully, and gave her the opportunity to telephone Rex to look
into the chute. But it didn’t really matter. If the scheme had fallen
through that morning, it would have been successful later on. Ada
was highly persevering.”
“You think then,” put in Markham, “that Rex really heard the shot
in Ada’s room that first night, and confided in her?”
“Undoubtedly. That part of her story was true enough. I’m inclined
to think that Rex heard the shot and had a vague idea Mrs. Greene
had fired it. Being rather close to his mother temperamentally, he
said nothing. Later he voiced his suspicions to Ada; and that
confession gave her the idea for killing him—or, rather, for perfecting
the technic she had already decided on; for Rex would have been
shot through the secret cupboard in any event. But Ada now saw a
way of establishing a perfect alibi for the occasion; although even
her idea of being actually with the police when the shot was fired
was not original. In Gross’s chapter on alibis there is much
suggestive material along that line.”
Heath sucked his teeth wonderingly.
“I’m glad I don’t run across many of her kind,” he remarked.
“She was her father’s daughter,” said Vance. “But too much credit
should not be given her, Sergeant. She had a printed and
diagrammed guide for everything. There was little for her to do but
follow instructions and keep her head. And as for Rex’s murder, don’t
forget that, although she was actually in Mr. Markham’s office at the
time of the shooting, she personally engineered the entire coup.
Think back. She refused to let either you or Mr. Markham come to
the house, and insisted upon visiting the office. Once there, she told
her story and suggested that Rex be summoned immediately. She
even went so far as to plead with us to call him by phone. Then,
when we had complied, she quickly informed us of the mysterious
diagram, and offered to tell Rex exactly where she had hidden it, so
he could bring it with him. And we sat there calmly, listening to her
send Rex to his death! Her actions at the Stock Exchange should
have given me a hint; but I confess I was particularly blind that
morning. She was in a state of high nervous excitement; and when
she broke down and sobbed on Mr. Markham’s desk after he had
told her of Rex’s death, her tears were quite real—only, they were
not for Rex; they were the reaction from that hour of terrific tension.”
“I begin to understand why no one up-stairs heard the shot,” said
Markham. “The revolver detonating in the wall, as it were, would
have been almost completely muffled. But why should Sproot have
heard it so distinctly down-stairs?”
“You remember there was a fireplace in the living-room directly
beneath Ada’s—Chester once told us it was rarely lighted because it
wouldn’t draw properly—and Sproot was in the butler’s pantry just
beyond. The sound of the report went downward through the flue
and, as a result, was heard plainly on the lower floor.”
“You said a minute ago, Mr. Vance,” argued Heath, “that Rex
maybe suspected the old lady. Then why should he have accused
Von Blon the way he did that day he had a fit?”
“The accusation primarily, I think, was a sort of instinctive effort to
drive the idea of Mrs. Greene’s guilt from his own mind. Then again,
as Von Blon explained, Rex was frightened after you had questioned
him about the revolver, and wanted to divert suspicion from himself.”
“Get on with the story of Ada’s plot, Vance.” This time it was
Markham who was impatient.
“The rest seems pretty obvious, don’t y’ know. It was
unquestionably Ada who was listening at the library door the
afternoon we were there. She realized we had found the books and
galoshes; and she had to think fast. So, when we came out, she told
us the dramatic yarn of having seen her mother walking, which was
sheer moonshine. She had run across those books on paralysis, d’
ye see, and they had suggested to her the possibility of focussing
suspicion on Mrs. Greene—the chief object of her hate. It is probably
true, as Von Blon said, that the two books do not deal with actual
hysterical paralysis and somnambulism, but they no doubt contain
references to these types of paralysis. I rather think Ada had
intended all along to kill the old lady last and have it appear as the
suicide of the murderer. But the proposed examination by
Oppenheimer changed all that. She learned of the examination when
she heard Von Blon apprise Mrs. Greene of it on his morning visit;
and, having told us of that mythical midnight promenade, she
couldn’t delay matters any longer. The old lady had to die—before
Oppenheimer arrived. And half an hour later Ada took the morphine.
She feared to give Mrs. Greene the strychnine at once lest it appear
suspicious. . . .”
“That’s where those books on poisons come in, isn’t it, Mr.
Vance?” interjected Heath. “When Ada had decided to use poison on
some of the family, she got all the dope she needed on the subject
outa the library.”
“Precisely. She herself took just enough morphine to render her
unconscious—probably about two grains. And to make sure she
would get immediate assistance she devised the simple trick of
having Sibella’s dog appear to give the alarm. Incidentally, this trick
cast suspicion on Sibella. After Ada had swallowed the morphine,
she merely waited until she began to feel drowsy, pulled the bell-
cord, caught the tassel in the dog’s teeth, and lay back. She
counterfeited a good deal of her illness; but Drumm couldn’t have
detected her malingering even if he had been as great a doctor as
he wanted us to believe; for the symptoms for all doses of morphine
taken by mouth are practically the same during the first half-hour.
And, once she was on her feet, she had only to watch for an
opportunity of giving the strychnine to Mrs. Greene. . . .”
“It all seems too cold-blooded to be real,” murmured Markham.
“And yet there has been any number of precedents for Ada’s
actions. Do you recall the mass murders of those three nurses,
Madame Jegado, Frau Zwanzigger, and Vrouw Van der Linden? And
there was Mrs. Belle Gunness, the female Bluebeard; and Amelia
Elizabeth Dyer, the Reading baby-farmer; and Mrs. Pearcey. Cold-
blooded? Yes! But in Ada’s case there was passion too. I’m inclined
to believe that it takes a particularly hot flame—a fire at white heat, in
fact—to carry the human heart through such a Gethsemane.
However that may be, Ada watched for her chance to poison Mrs.
Greene, and found it that night. The nurse went to the third floor to
prepare for bed between eleven and eleven-thirty; and during that
half-hour Ada visited her mother’s room. Whether she suggested the
citrocarbonate or Mrs. Greene herself asked for it, we’ll never know.
Probably the former, for Ada had always given it to her at night.
When the nurse came down-stairs again Ada was already back in
bed, apparently asleep, and Mrs. Greene was on the verge of her
first—and, let us hope, her only—convulsion.”
“Doremus’s post-mortem report must have given her a terrific
shock,” commented Markham.
“It did. It upset all her calculations. Imagine her feelings when we
informed her that Mrs. Greene couldn’t have walked! She backed out
of the danger nicely, though. The detail of the Oriental shawl,
however, nearly entangled her. But even that point she turned to her
own advantage by using it as a clew against Sibella.”
“How do you account for Mrs. Mannheim’s actions during that
interview?” asked Markham. “You remember her saying it might have
been she whom Ada saw in the hall.”
A cloud came over Vance’s face.
“I think,” he said sadly, “that Frau Mannheim began to suspect
her little Ada at that point. She knew the terrible history of the girl’s
father, and perhaps had lived in fear of some criminal outcropping in
the child.”
There was a silence for several moments. Each of us was busy
with his own thoughts. Then Vance continued:
“After Mrs. Greene’s death, only Sibella stood between Ada and
her blazing goal; and it was Sibella herself who gave her the idea for
a supposedly safe way to commit the final murder. Weeks ago, on a
ride Van and I took with the two girls and Von Blon, Sibella’s
venomous pique led her to make a foolish remark about running
one’s victim over a precipice in a machine; and it no doubt appealed
to Ada’s sense of the fitness of things that Sibella should thus
suggest the means of her own demise. I wouldn’t be at all surprised
if Ada intended, after having killed her sister, to say that Sibella had
tried to murder her, but that she had suspected the other’s purpose
and jumped from the car in time to save herself; and that Sibella had
miscalculated the car’s speed and been carried over the precipice.
The fact that Von Blon and Van and I had heard Sibella speculate on
just such a method of murder would have given weight to Ada’s
story. And what a neat ending it would have made—Sibella, the
murderer, dead; the case closed; Ada, the inheritor of the Greene
millions, free to do as she chose! And—’pon my soul, Markham!—it
came very near succeeding.”
Vance sighed, and reached for the decanter. After refilling our
glasses he settled back and smoked moodily.
“I wonder how long this terrible plot had been in preparation.
We’ll never know. Maybe years. There was no haste in Ada’s
preparations. Everything was worked out carefully; and she let
circumstances—or, rather, opportunity—guide her. Once she had
secured the revolver, it was only a question of waiting for a chance
when she could make the footprints and be sure the gun would sink
out of sight in the snow-drift on the balcony steps. Yes, the most
essential condition of her scheme was the snow. . . . Amazin’!”
There is little more to add to this record. The truth was not given
out, and the case was “shelved.” The following year Tobias’s will was
upset by the Supreme Court in Equity—that is, the twenty-five-year
domiciliary clause was abrogated in view of all that had happened at
the house; and Sibella came into the entire Greene fortune. How
much Markham had to do with the decision, through his influence
with the Administration judge who rendered it, I don’t know; and
naturally I have never asked. But the old Greene mansion was, as
you remember, torn down shortly afterward, and the estate sold to a
realty corporation.
Mrs. Mannheim, broken-hearted over Ada’s death, claimed her
inheritance—which Sibella generously doubled—and returned to
Germany to seek what comfort she might among the nieces and
nephews with whom, according to Chester, she was constantly
corresponding. Sproot went back to England. He told Vance before
departing that he had long planned a cottage retreat in Surrey where
he could loaf and invite his soul. I picture him now, sitting on an ivied
porch overlooking the Downs, reading his beloved Martial.
Doctor and Mrs. Von Blon, immediately after the court’s decision
relating to the will, sailed for the Riviera and spent a belated
honeymoon there. They are now settled in Vienna, where the doctor
has become a Privatdocent at the University—his father’s Alma
Mater. He is, I understand, making quite a name for himself in the
field of neurology.
Endnotes
1 It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to state that I have received official
permission for my task. ↩︎
2 “The Benson Murder Case” (Scribners, 1926). ↩︎
3 “The ‘Canary’ Murder Case” (Scribners, 1927). ↩︎
4 This was subsequently proved correct. Nearly a year later Maleppo was
arrested in Detroit, extradited to New York, and convicted of the murder.
His two companions had already been successfully prosecuted for
robbery. They are now serving long terms in Sing Sing. ↩︎
5 Amos Feathergill was then an Assistant District Attorney. He later ran on
the Tammany ticket for assemblyman, and was elected. ↩︎
6It was Sergeant Ernest Heath, of the Homicide Bureau, who had been in
charge of both the Benson and the Canary cases; and, although he had
been openly antagonistic to Vance during the first of these investigations,
a curious good-fellowship had later grown up between them. Vance
admired the Sergeant’s dogged and straightforward qualities; and Heath
had developed a keen respect—with certain reservations, however—for
Vance’s abilities. ↩︎
7 Vance, after reading proof of this sentence, requested me to make
mention here of that beautiful volume, “Terra Cotta of the Italian
Renaissance,” recently published by the National Terra Cotta Society, New
York. ↩︎
8 Doctor Emanuel Doremus, the Chief Medical Examiner. ↩︎
9 Sibella was here referring to Tobias Greene’s will, which stipulated not
only that the Greene mansion should be maintained intact for twenty-five
years, but that the legatees should live on the estate during that time or
become disinherited. ↩︎
10 E. Plon, Nourrit et Cie., Paris, 1893. ↩︎
11Inspector William M. Moran, who died last summer, had been the
commanding officer of the Detective Bureau for eight years. He was a
man of rare and unusual qualities, and with his death the New York Police
Department lost one of its most efficient and trustworthy officials. He had
formerly been a well-known up-State banker who had been forced to close
his doors during the 1907 panic. ↩︎
12 Captain Anthony P. Jerym was one of the shrewdest and most
painstaking criminologists of the New York Police Department. Though he
had begun his career as an expert in the Bertillon system of
measurements, he had later specialized in footprints—a subject which he
had helped to elevate to an elaborate and complicated science. He had
spent several years in Vienna studying Austrian methods, and had
developed a means of scientific photography for footprints which gave him
rank with such men as Londe, Burais, and Reiss. ↩︎
13 I remember, back in the nineties, when I was a schoolboy, hearing my
father allude to certain picturesque tales of Tobias Greene’s escapades. ↩︎
14 Captain Hagedorn was the expert who supplied Vance with the
technical data in the Benson murder case, which made it possible for him
to establish the height of the murderer. ↩︎
15 It was Inspector Brenner who examined and reported on the chiselled
jewel-box in the “Canary” murder case. ↩︎
16 Among the famous cases mentioned as being in some manner
comparable to the Greene shootings were the mass murders of Landru,
Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, Fritz Haarmann, and Mrs. Belle Gunness; the
tavern murders of the Benders; the Van der Linden poisonings in Holland;
the Bela Kiss tin-cask stranglings; the Rugeley murders of Doctor William
Palmer; and the beating to death of Benjamin Nathan. ↩︎
17 The famous impure-milk scandal was then to the fore, and the cases
were just appearing on the court calendar. Also, at that time, there was an
anti-gambling campaign in progress in New York; and the District
Attorney’s office had charge of all the prosecutions. ↩︎
18The Modern Gallery was then under the direction of Marius de Zayas,
whose collection of African statuette-fetiches was perhaps the finest in
America. ↩︎
19 Colonel Benjamin Hanlon, one of the Department’s greatest authorities
on extradition, was then the commanding officer of the Detective Division
attached to the District Attorney’s office, with quarters in the Criminal
Courts Building. ↩︎
20 Among the volumes of Tobias Greene’s library I may mention the
following as typical of the entire collection: Heinroth’s “De morborum animi
et pathematum animi differentia,” Hoh’s “De maniæ pathologia,” P. S.
Knight’s “Observations on the Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of
Derangement of the Mind,” Krafft-Ebing’s “Grundzüge der Kriminal-
Psychologie,” Bailey’s “Diary of a Resurrectionist,” Lange’s “Om
Arvelighedens Inflydelse i Sindssygedommene,” Leuret’s “Fragments
psychologiques sur la folie,” D’Aguanno’s “Recensioni di antropologia
giuridica,” Amos’s “Crime and Civilization,” Andronico’s “Studi clinici sul
delitto,” Lombroso’s “Uomo Delinquente,” de Aramburu’s “La nueva
ciencia penal,” Bleakley’s “Some Distinguished Victims of the Scaffold,”
Arenal’s “Psychologie comparée du criminel,” Aubry’s “De l’homicide
commis par la femme,” Beccaria’s “Crimes and Punishments,” Benedikt’s
“Anatomical Studies upon the Brains of Criminals,” Bittinger’s “Crimes of
Passion and of Reflection,” Bosselli’s “Nuovi studi sul tatuaggio nei
criminali,” Favalli’s “La delinquenza in rapporto alla civiltà,” de Feyfer’s
“Verhandeling over den Kindermoord,” Fuld’s “Der Realismus und das
Strafrecht,” Hamilton’s “Scientific Detection of Crime,” von Holtzendorff’s
“Das Irische Gefängnissystem insbesondere die Zwischenanstalten vor
der Entlassung der Sträflinge,” Jardine’s “Criminal Trials,” Lacassagne’s
“L’homme criminel comparé à l’homme primitif,” Llanos y Torriglia’s “Ferri y
su escuela,” Owen Luke’s “History of Crime in England,” MacFarlane’s
“Lives and Exploits of Banditti,” M’Levy’s “Curiosities of Crime in
Edinburgh,” the “Complete Newgate Calendar,” Pomeroy’s “German and
French Criminal Procedure,” Rizzone’s “Delinquenza e punibilità,”
Rosenblatt’s “Skizzen aus der Verbrecherwelt,” Soury’s “Le crime et les
criminels,” Wey’s “Criminal Anthropology,” Amadei’s “Crani d’assassini,”
Benedikt’s “Der Raubthiertypus am menschlichen Gehirne,” Fasini’s “Studi
su delinquenti femmine,” Mills’s “Arrested and Aberrant Development and
Gyres in the Brain of Paranoiacs and Criminals,” de Paoli’s “Quattro crani
di delinquenti,” Zuckerkandl’s “Morphologie des Gesichtsschädels,”
Bergonzoli’s “Sui pazzi criminali in Italia,” Brierre de Boismont’s “Rapports
de la folie suicide avec la folie homicide,” Buchnet’s “The Relation of
Madness to Crime,” Calucci’s “Il jure penale e la freniatria,” Davey’s
“Insanity and Crime,” Morel’s “Le procès Chorinski,” Parrot’s “Sur la
monomanie homicide,” Savage’s “Moral Insanity,” Teed’s “On Mind,
Insanity, and Criminality,” Worckmann’s “On Crime and Insanity,”
Vaucher’s “Système préventif des délits et des crimes,” Thacker’s
“Psychology of Vice and Crime,” Tarde’s “La Criminalité Comparée,”
Tamassia’s “Gli ultimi studi sulla criminalità,” Sikes’s “Studies of
Assassination,” Senior’s “Remarkable Crimes and Trials in Germany,”
Savarini’s “Vexata Quæstio,” Sampson’s “Rationale of Crime,” Noellner’s
“Kriminal-psychologische Denkwürdigkeiten,” Sighele’s “La foule
criminelle,” and Korsakoff’s “Kurs psichiatrii.” ↩︎
21 Doctor Blyth was one of the defense witnesses in the Crippen trial. ↩︎
22 Doctor Felix Oppenheimer was then the leading authority on paralysis
in America. He has since returned to Germany, where he now holds the
chair of neurology at the University of Freiburg. ↩︎
23 Hennessey was the detective stationed in the Narcoss Flats to watch
the Greene mansion. ↩︎
24It will be remembered that in the famous Molineux poisoning case the
cyanide of mercury was administered by way of a similar drug—to wit:
Bromo-Seltzer. ↩︎
25 Chief Inspector O’Brien, who was in command of the entire Police
Department, was, I learned later, an uncle of the Miss O’Brien who was
acting officially as nurse at the Greene mansion. ↩︎
26 I recalled that Guilfoyle and Mallory were the two men who had been
set to watch Tony Skeel in the Canary murder case. ↩︎
27 Vance was here referring to the chapter called “The Æsthetic
Hypothesis” in Clive Bell’s “Art.” But, despite the somewhat slighting
character of his remark, Vance was an admirer of Bell’s criticisms, and had
spoken to me with considerable enthusiasm of his “Since Cézanne.” ↩︎
28 This was the first and only time during my entire friendship with Vance
that I ever heard him use a Scriptural expletive. ↩︎
29 As I learned later, Doctor Von Blon, who was an ardent amateur
photographer, often used half-gramme tablets of cyanide of potassium;
and there had been three of them in his dark-room when Ada had called.
Several days later, when preparing to redevelop a plate, he could find only
two, but had thought little of the loss until questioned by Vance. ↩︎
30I later asked Vance to rearrange the items for me in the order of his final
sequence. The distribution, which told him the truth, was as follows: 3, 4,
44, 92, 9, 6, 2, 47, 1, 5, 32, 31, 98, 8, 81, 84, 82, 7, 10, 11, 61, 15, 16, 93,
33, 94, 76, 75, 48, 17, 38, 55, 54, 18, 39, 56, 41, 42, 28, 43, 58, 59, 83,
74, 40, 12, 34, 13, 14, 37, 22, 23, 35, 36, 19, 73, 26, 20, 21, 45, 25, 46,
27, 29, 30, 57, 77, 24, 78, 79, 51, 50, 52, 53, 49, 95, 80, 85, 86, 87, 88,
60, 62, 64, 63, 66, 65, 96, 89, 67, 71, 69, 68, 70, 97, 90, 91, 72. ↩︎
31 We later learned from Mrs. Mannheim that Mannheim had once saved
Tobias from criminal prosecution by taking upon himself the entire blame
of one of Tobias’s shadiest extra-legal transactions, and had exacted from
Tobias the promise that, in event of his own death or incarceration, he
would adopt and care for Ada, whom Mrs. Mannheim had placed in a
private institution at the age of five, to protect her from Mannheim’s
influence. ↩︎
32An account of the cases of Madeleine Smith and Constance Kent may
be found in Edmund Lester Pearson’s “Murder at Smutty Nose”; and a
record of Marie Boyer’s case is included in H. B. Irving’s “A Book of
Remarkable Criminals.” Grete Beyer was the last woman to be publicly
executed in Germany. ↩︎
33 “Selbstverletzungen kommen nicht selten vor; abgesehen von solchen
bei fingierten Raubanfällen, stösst man auf sie dann, wenn
Entschädigungen erpresst werden sollen; so geschieht es, dass nach
einer harmlosen Balgerei einer der Kämpfenden mit Verletzungen auftritt,
die er damals erlitten haben will. Kenntlich sind solche
Selbstverstümmelungen daran, dass die Betreffenden meistens die
Operation wegen der grossen Schmerzen nicht ganz zu Ende führen, und
dass es meistens Leute mit übertrieben pietistischer Färbung und mehr
einsamen Lebenswandels sind.”—H. Gross, “Handbuch für
Untersuchungsrichter als System der Kriminalistik,” I, pp. 32–34. ↩︎
34 “Dass man sich durch den Sitz der Wunde niemals täuschen lassen
darf, beweisen zwei Fälle. Im Wiener Prater hatte sich ein Mann in
Gegenwart mehrerer Personen getötet, indem er sich mit einem Revolver
in den Hinterkopf schoss. Wären nicht die Aussagen der Zeugen
vorgelegen, hätte wohl kaum jemand an einen Selbstmord geglaubt. Ein
Soldat tötete sich durch einen in den Rücken gehenden Schuss aus
einem Militärgewehr, über das er nach entsprechender Fixierung sich
gelegt hatte; auch hier wäre aus dem Sitz der Wunde wohl kaum auf
Selbstmord geschlossen worden.”—Ibid., II, p. 843. ↩︎
35 “Es wurde zeitlich morgens dem UR. die Meldung von der Auffindung
eines ‘Ermordeten’ überbracht. An Ort und Stelle fand sich der Leichnam
eines für wohlhabend geltenden Getreidehändlers M., auf dem Gesichte
liegend, mit einer Schusswunde hinter dem rechten Ohre. Die Kugel war
über dem linken Auge im Stirnknochen stecken geblieben, nachdem sie
das Gehirn durchdrungen hatte. Die Fundstelle der Leiche befand sich
etwa in der Mitte einer über einen ziemlich tiefen Fluss führenden Brücke.
Am Schlusse der Lokalerhebungen und als die Leiche eben zur Obduktion
fortgebracht werden sollte, fiel es dem UR. zufällig auf, dass das (hölzerne
und wettergraue) Brückengeländer an der Stelle, wo auf dem Boden der
Leichnam lag, eine kleine und sichtlich ganz frische Beschädigung
aufwies, so als ob man dort (am oberen Rande) mit einem harten,
kantigen Körper heftig angestossen wäre. Der Gedanke, dass dieser
Umstand mit dem Morde in Zusammenhang stehe, war nicht gut von der
Hand zu weisen. Ein Kahn war bald zur Stelle und am Brückenjoche
befestigt; nun wurde vom Kahne aus (unter der fraglichen Stelle) der
Flussgrund mit Rechen an langen Stielen sorgfältig abgesucht. Nach
kurzer Arbeit kam wirklich etwas Seltsames zutage: eine etwa 4 m lange
starke Schnur, an deren einem Ende ein grosser Feldstein, an deren
anderem Ende eine abgeschossene Pistole befestigt war, in deren Lauf
die später aus dem Kopfe des M. genommene Kugel genau passte. Nun
war die Sache klarer Selbstmord; der Mann hatte sich mit der
aufgefundenen Vorrichtung auf die Brücke begeben, den Stein über das
Brückengeländer gehängt und sich die Kugel hinter dem rechten Ohre ins
Hirn gejagt. Als er getroffen war, liess er die Pistole infolge des durch den
Stein bewirkten Zuges aus und diese wurde von dem schweren Steine an
der Schnur über das Geländer und in das Wasser gezogen. Hierbei hatte
die Pistole, als sie das Geländer passierte, heftig an dieses angeschlagen
und die betreffende Verletzung erzeugt.”—Ibid., II, pp. 834–836. ↩︎
36 “Die Absicht kann dahin gehen, den Verdacht von sich auf jemand
anderen zu wälzen, was namentlich dann Sinn hat, wenn der Täter schon
im voraus annehmen durfte, dass sich der Verdacht auf ihn lenken werde.
In diesem Falle erzeugt er recht auffallende, deutliche Spuren und zwar
mit angezogenen Schuhen, die von den seinigen sich wesentlich
unterscheiden. Man kann, wie angestellte Versuche beweisen, in dieser
Weise recht gute Spuren erzeugen.”—Ibid., II, p. 667. ↩︎
37 “Über Gummiüberschuhe und Galoschen s. Loock; Chem. u. Phot. bei
Krim. Forschungen: Düsseldorf, II, p. 56.”—Ibid., II, p. 668. ↩︎
38 “Die neuesten amerikanischen Schutzvorrichtungen haben direkt mit
der Kasse selbst nichts zu tun und können eigentlich an jedem
Behältnisse angebracht werden. Sie bestehen aus chemisehen
Schutzmitteln oder Selbstschüssen, und wollen die Anwesenheit eines
Menschen, der den Schrank unbefugt geöffnet hat, aus sanitären oder
sonst physischen Gründen unmöglich machen. Auch die juristische Seite
der Frage ist zu erwägen, da man den Einbrecher doch nicht ohne
weiteres töten oder an der Gesundheit schädigen darf.
Nichtsdestoweniger wurde im Jahre 1902 ein Einbrecher in Berlin durch
einen solchen Selbstschuss in die Stirne getötet, der an die Panzertüre
einer Kasse befestigt war. Derartige Selbstschüsse wurden auch zu
Morden verwendet; der Mechaniker G. Z. stellte einen Revolver in einer
Kredenz auf, verband den Drücker mit der Türe durch eine Schnur und
erschoss auf diese Art seine Frau, während er tatsächlich von seinem
Wohnorte abwesend war. R. C., ein Budapester Kaufmann, befestigte in
einem, seinem Bruder gehörigen Zigarrenkasten, eine Pistole, die beim
Öffnen des Deckels seinen Bruder durch einen Unterleibsschuss tötlich
verletzte. Der Rückschlag warf die Kiste von ihrem Standort, sodass der
Mördermechanismus zu Tage trat, ehe R. C. denselben bei Seite schaffen
konnte.”—Ibid., II, p. 943. ↩︎
Transcriber Notes
This transcription follows the text of the first edition published by
Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1928. However, the following alterations
have been made to correct what are believed to be unambiguous
errors in the text:
Two occurrences of missing quotation marks have been

restored;
“betwen” has been corrected to “between” (Chapter IV);
“aways be” has been corrected to “always be” (Chapter V);
“Departmen” has been corrected to “Department” (Chapter VIII);
“te panels” has been corrected to “the panels” (Chapter XXVI).
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Transnational Perspectives on Latin

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

ALADI Latin American Integration Association

public life, culture, institutions, and development of post-​authoritarian politics

What Is in a Name? The Conceptual Constructs for a

Following the Spanish-​American War of 1898, the modernists resumed a spirit

Comparative and Transnational Perspectives

opened the way for bringing comparative analysis and transfer/​transnational

societies of Latin America in terms of their separate languages, for instance

important is the formation of new forms of consciousness and decentered at-

Why was the most Americanized country in Central America, whose

psychological hatred or irrational paranoia—​ that stood behind the wary

being reframed repeatedly by both monarchist and republican leaders into a

concern of academics studying migration was to follow patterns of sociocultural

Only relatively recently have the transnational dimensions seriously been

calls attention to a no less important dimension: the persistent yet changing

As a concept used by academics, modernity has been associated with a series

Atlantic Modernity and Colonialism

In the context of transatlantic development, the uses and analysis of Latin

Latin America and Its Multiple Modernities

A kind of global awareness crystallized and provided parameters of institu-

societies, which prompted a continuous search for universal models of devel-

covered a wide programmatic spectrum: freedom of the press, division of

A Mexican provincial newspaper argued that instilling “democracy” and

claimed by Latin American conservatives, or should social forces promote it ac-

kawsay, suma qamaña, and allin kawsay—​appeared in official charters and in

Two occurrences of missing quotation marks have been

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

public life, culture, institutions, and development of post-authoritarian politics

Following the Spanish-American War of 1898, the modernists resumed a spirit

opened the way for bringing comparative analysis and transfer/transnational

psychological hatred or irrational paranoia— that stood behind the wary

kawsay, suma qamaña, and allin kawsay—appeared in official charters and in